Greater Good: Happinesshttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/happiness
Greater Good: HappinessenGreater GoodCopyright 20122012-09-13T00:10:00+00:00What Can Americans Dream Now?http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_can_americans_dream_now
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_can_americans_dream_now#When:11:38:00ZWhat does the good life look like in 21st century America?

Is it still a single-family home and two cars, as it was for earlier generations? Or is there a “new better off” for millennials entering adulthood, one that emphasizes social connection and sharing over prosperity and ownership?

Martin is an author, social entrepreneur, and weekly columnist for On Being, with two TED talks and five books under her belt. She lives with her family in Temescal Commons, a co-housing community in Oakland—an experience that inspired The New Better Off.

We talked with Martin about her new book—and the prospects for a healthy community and economy in a time of transition and unrest.

Jenara Nerenberg: How did you find the focus of this book?

Courtney Martin: It’s funny, because when I set out to write this book, I was thinking of it far more in terms of individual pursuit of success and how are we re-defining how we individually achieve the so-called American dream.

But as I reported, I kept coming back to this theme of re-focusing on a collective definition of success and quality of life in this so-called dream. In 2013 I found out I was pregnant with my daughter and my husband got a job offer in the Bay Area, and we decided to take the East to West Coast plunge. And as I was doing it, we had the incredible good fortune of knowing someone who was leaving a co-housing community in Oakland.

So without really knowing what the arc of this book would be—we ultimately both ended up freelancing, moving into this co-housing community, having kids, seeking out co-working communities and collaborators that were outside the traditional workplace norms. So it really was a process of both reporting and writing the book but also living my own way into these answers in real time. So it’s political but also deeply personal for me.

JN: Is it actually a form of privilege, being able to piece together a freelance lifestyle in what some people call the “gig economy”? That might not be available to some people who don’t have a financial padding or supportive partner.

CM: Yes, one of the things I wish I could have handled differently is the chapter on money. The discussion around the $75,000 happiness plateau doesn’t take into account having a safety net. I think having a safety net and coming from privilege does impact being able to handle a freelance life. The hard part about it that doesn’t make it so cut and dry is that a lot of “traditional 9-5” jobs are also not that dependable either. There’s often no reliable schedule, no benefits, no unions. I don’t think traditional jobs have ever been so insecure, so the contrast is getting smaller and smaller.

JN: I feel like this book was really written for younger millennials, those who are just at the brink of thinking about their futures in terms of love, family, work, and spirituality. Did you have millennials in mind? What is your advice to them?

CM: I do think I wrote with a millennial audience in mind. There was a moment in writing this book when I wrote a letter to a 26-year-old friend, trying to figure out my voice and re-claim what I was trying to say, because she is my audience.

The funny thing is that since publishing, many millennials have told me they are buying the book for their parents because they feel it explains to their parents what they are doing and why they’re doing it in a way that they can’t. Parents are worried their children are making crazy choices—like super-involved fathers staying home or freelance careers—so it’s much easier to have a third party explain choices to parents, and I think the book is becoming a proxy for that.

In terms of advice, I would tell millennials to invest time in their relationships. The truth is those 22-year-old peers grow up to have influence, and professionally those relationships can create opportunities. Genuine networks—people you feel are actually invested in you—are way more important than figuring out exactly what you’re going to do.

JN: Do they have any models for that kind of life?

CM: My not-so-covert chapter about work-life balance for fathers looked at the old model of leadership where everything gets sacrificed for work. We don’t do a great job of highlighting models where passionate work and commitment to family are both present. A lot of millennials are rebelling against that. People feel repelled by those sacrifices.

The truth is that economically we don’t have the policies set up to have work-life balance and it’s also in our culture. We worship at the feet of people who over-work. So what does it look like to collectively shift that, rather than chalk that up to individual people? I think it’s an unfinished shift and a lot of people are living into that right now.

JN: What’s catching your attention now, since the publishing of the book?

CM: One very obvious thing for me is what I call “the conversation under the conversation” that’s happening under the election—there’s so much rhetoric about the American dream and what it means and what Americans are promised. On a deep level, I think what voters are trying to understand is that they’re looking at their own lives and wondering, “Is this the life I was promised? Is the country supporting my best quality of life?” And I think a lot of people feel like it isn’t—and for good reason.

That’s leading to a lot of fear and blaming—and so for me that means how to re-structure the policies in this country so they actually do support people to live their best lives. But let’s also question the cultural narrative around what the best life means in America. Maybe it’s not getting rich like Trump. Does it look like he’s living the best quality of life for a human being? Not from my perspective.

So it’s interesting to be watching this election and think about how my book speaks to a lot of the things that are ultimately not being said by either candidate, because they’re below the surface—below the level of rhetoric.

JN: What research or insights that you came across make you the most hopeful or optimistic about our future?

CM: Living in co-housing has led me to do more research on this way of living—in a formal respect, with people owning their own homes and sharing common areas like kitchen, garden toolshed—and it shows that it helps on all these different fronts, especially America’s most pressing problems, like lack of care and housing options for our aging population, and for working families who are both psychologically and financially stretched.

For me that’s exciting—though this setup is still rare—but it does make me more hopeful and it seems like co-housing is the thing that people are really responding to with such enthusiasm in terms of the book and my TED talk. People are really seeking out different ways of living, so it’s just a matter of keeping up the supply with the demand.

]]>What does the good life look like in 21st century America?
Is it still a single-family home and two cars, as it was for earlier generations? Or is there a “new better off” for millennials entering adulthood, one that emphasizes social connection and sharing over prosperity and ownership?
In The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream, Courtney Martin explores the changing landscape of aspiration and community in the United States today, one shaped by co-working, freelance careers, co-housing, and social media.
Martin is an author, social entrepreneur, and weekly columnist for On Being, with two TED talks and five books under her belt. She lives with her family in Temescal Commons, a co-housing community in Oakland—an experience that inspired The New Better Off.
We talked with Martin about her new book—and the prospects for a healthy community and economy in a time of transition and unrest.
Jenara Nerenberg: How did you find the focus of this book?
Courtney Martin: It’s funny, because when I set out to write this book, I was thinking of it far more in terms of individual pursuit of success and how are we re-defining how we individually achieve the so-called American dream.
But as I reported, I kept coming back to this theme of re-focusing on a collective definition of success and quality of life in this so-called dream. In 2013 I found out I was pregnant with my daughter and my husband got a job offer in the Bay Area, and we decided to take the East to West Coast plunge. And as I was doing it, we had the incredible good fortune of knowing someone who was leaving a co-housing community in Oakland.
So without really knowing what the arc of this book would be—we ultimately both ended up freelancing, moving into this co-housing community, having kids, seeking out co-working communities and collaborators that were outside the traditional workplace norms. So it really was a process of both reporting and writing the book but also living my own way into these answers in real time. So it’s political but also deeply personal for me.
JN: Is it actually a form of privilege, being able to piece together a freelance lifestyle in what some people call the “gig economy”? That might not be available to some people who don’t have a financial padding or supportive partner.
CM: Yes, one of the things I wish I could have handled differently is the chapter on money. The discussion around the $75,000 happiness plateau doesn’t take into account having a safety net. I think having a safety net and coming from privilege does impact being able to handle a freelance life. The hard part about it that doesn’t make it so cut and dry is that a lot of “traditional 9-5” jobs are also not that dependable either. There’s often no reliable schedule, no benefits, no unions. I don’t think traditional jobs have ever been so insecure, so the contrast is getting smaller and smaller.
JN: I feel like this book was really written for younger millennials, those who are just at the brink of thinking about their futures in terms of love, family, work, and spirituality. Did you have millennials in mind? What is your advice to them?
CM: I do think I wrote with a millennial audience in mind. There was a moment in writing this book when I wrote a letter to a 26-year-old friend, trying to figure out my voice and re-claim what I was trying to say, because she is my audience.
The funny thing is that since publishing, many millennials have told me they are buying the book for their parents because they feel it explains to their parents what they are doing and why they’re doing it in a way that they can’t. Parents are worried their children are making crazy choices—like super-involved fathers staying home or freelance careers—so it’s much easier to have a third party explain choices to parents, and I think the book is becoming a proxy for that.
In terms of advice, I would tell millennials to invest time in their relationships. The truth is those 22-year-old peers grow up to have influence, and professionally those relationships can create opportunities. Genuine networks—people you feel are actually invested in you—are way more important than figuring out exactly what you’re going to do.
JN: Do they have any models for that kind of life?
CM: My not-so-covert chapter about work-life balance for fathers looked at the old model of leadership where everything gets sacrificed for work. We don’t do a great job of highlighting models where passionate work and commitment to family are both present. A lot of millennials are rebelling against that. People feel repelled by those sacrifices.
The truth is that economically we don’t have the policies set up to have work-life balance and it’s also in our culture. We worship at the feet of people who over-work. So what does it look like to collectively shift that, rather than chalk that up to individual people? I think it’s an unfinished shift and a lot of people are living into that right now.
JN: What’s catching your attention now, since the publishing of the book?
CM: One very obvious thing for me is what I call “the conversation under the conversation” that’s happening under the election—there’s so much rhetoric about the American dream and what it means and what Americans are promised. On a deep level, I think what voters are trying to understand is that they’re looking at their own lives and wondering, “Is this the life I was promised? Is the country supporting my best quality of life?” And I think a lot of people feel like it isn’t—and for good reason.
That’s leading to a lot of fear and blaming—and so for me that means how to re-structure the policies in this country so they actually do support people to live their best lives. But let’s also question the cultural narrative around what the best life means in America. Maybe it’s not getting rich like Trump. Does it look like he’s living the best quality of life for a human being? Not from my perspective.
So it’s interesting to be watching this election and think about how my book speaks to a lot of the things that are ultimately not being said by either candidate, because they’re below the surface—below the level of rhetoric.
JN: What research or insights that you came across make you the most hopeful or optimistic about our future?
CM: Living in co-housing has led me to do more research on this way of living—in a formal respect, with people owning their own homes and sharing common areas like kitchen, garden toolshed—and it shows that it helps on all these different fronts, especially America’s most pressing problems, like lack of care and housing options for our aging population, and for working families who are both psychologically and financially stretched.
For me that’s exciting—though this setup is still rare—but it does make me more hopeful and it seems like co-housing is the thing that people are really responding to with such enthusiasm in terms of the book and my TED talk. People are really seeking out different ways of living, so it’s just a matter of keeping up the supply with the demand.community, family, money, politics, relationships, success, work, Q&amp;A, Work & Career, Big Ideas, Happiness2016-12-09T11:38:00+00:00Our Favorite Books of 2016http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/our_favorite_books_of_2016
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/our_favorite_books_of_2016#When:11:06:00ZIn many ways, 2016 was a banner year for books related to our themes of compassion, kindness, empathy, happiness, and mindfulness. Judging from the number of books to arrive at our office, the science of a meaningful life is hitting its full stride, with more and more people recognizing how to apply new insights to our daily lives. Yet, while the number of books was encouraging, many of them seemed to repeat old themes and research, without offering much new in the way of insight.

That’s why many of our favorite books of 2016 do something a little bit extra: They take our science to a new level, looking at how schools, organizations, and society at large can apply research to create a more successful and compassionate world.

We’re constantly making decisions about what to buy, wear, believe, and spend our time on. Most of us see these choices as determined by our inherent values and preferences—but according to Wharton professor Jonah Berger’s book Invisible Influence, that is partly an illusion.

In fact, we’re constantly, subconsciously affected by the thoughts and actions of others. Social influence can sometimes be harmful: Groups can easily slide into passive consensus, with whoever speaks first setting the tone of the entire discussion. The culture of certain organizations can make others feel excluded, the way “masculine” academic majors like computer science seem closed to women.

The key, Berger argues, is to use social influence for good. All it takes is one dissenting view to turn a misguided consensus into healthy disagreement. Creating a more diverse environment in your workplace or classroom can help more people feel like they belong, rather than feeling pressure to be the same as everyone else. In the end, recognizing the far-reaching power of social influence can not only make us more self-aware, Berger argues, but can also help us build a better society.

Though we Americans tend to think that we are the masters of our own destiny and that hard work pays off, we are only partly right: Many of us succeed at work and in life because of luck, too, according to Robert Frank’s book, Success and Luck.

Research shows that the family we are born into (and even birth order), the opportunities available in our neighborhood, the schools we attend, and whether or not we have positive adult mentors—all of which are beyond our individual control—play an important role in whether or not we succeed in life.

Still, many of us buy into the myth of the “self-made man” (or woman) because we are unaware of the many psychological biases we hold that create the illusion of personal merit. The halo effect, hindsight bias, and attribution bias all play a role in making us feel that our success (or that of others) is largely due to character or smarts, rather than to the luck of our personal life circumstances.

Why is it important to recognize this? By clinging too much to the belief that we deserve our fortune, we are less likely to treat others with empathy or fairness. Frank hopes that understanding the role of luck in success will help people to embrace public policies that achieve more fairness for those who’ve been left behind economically through no fault of their own.

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik argues against this approach, saying that parents don’t need to “mold” their children; they need to raise them in safe spaces filled with warmth, freedom to explore, and safety nets. Babies and toddlers are keen observers of their world, actively and accurately interpreting what people and objects do and why they do it—like little scientists. Nurturing their exploration is crucial for the human species to innovate, evolve, and adapt to a rapidly changing environment.

The Gardener and the Carpenter is a sophisticated read, not a prescriptive, how-to-parent book. But it does allow a peek under the hood of how children develop and what they really need from the caring adults around them. The book charts a strong, philosophical course, from which specific actions and decisions naturally follow.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent five years listening to devoted members of the Tea Party to write Strangers in Their Own Land. Her book helps explain why people who have struggled to survive the indignities of a declining economy and environment might support politicians who want to deregulate industry and cut taxes on the wealthy, giving us insight into the narrative frames and the “hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety” of many working-class Americans.

Hochschild discovers an undeclared class war—but not the one liberals and progressives see, between the one percent and the 99 percent. This class war is between the middle class, the working class—and the poor. According to her interviewees, the federal government is on the wrong side of that war, providing help to the poorest while neglecting everyone else. This opens the door to the kind of resentment that fueled the rise of Donald Trump.

Strangers in Their Own Land doesn’t try to figure out how to solve the world’s problems or bring together a new coalition to address them. Hochschild’s mission is to open a window into the minds and hearts of people who seem alien and irrational to blue-state liberals. It’s up to us to take it from here.

We tend to believe that attaining power requires force, deception, manipulation, and coercion. But, as seductive as these ideas are, they are dead wrong, according to GGSC co-founder and faculty director Dacher Keltner in his new book, The Power Paradox.

Keltner has spent years studying how people acquire and maintain power in groups and what happens to their behavior after power is granted. What he has discovered is that “empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are force, deception, or terror.” Meaningful influence, the kind that endures, comes from a focus on the needs of others and is not won, but given to us by other people because of our kindness and social intelligence.

Unfortunately, when one becomes powerful in a group, that feeling of power can impair the very skills of social intelligence that are vital to maintaining power and wielding it responsibly. Once people have been granted power, they tend to ignore those around them and become less empathic. This is the power paradox.

How we handle the power paradox guides our personal and work lives and determines, ultimately, how happy we and the people around us will be—and Keltner’s book aims to help us see the impact of power and how we can avoid its pitfalls.

In The Happiness Track, Emma Seppälä tries to untangle one of the knottiest problems of the modern age: our burned-out, overscheduled lifestyle. We are stuck in a jumble of feeling overwhelmed yet never accomplishing enough, trussed up by assumptions that we hold about productivity, such as Success requires stress. We have to compete with others. We can’t cut ourselves any slack.

Typically, people who are stressed are advised to manage their time better: Prioritize, make to-do lists, and delegate unnecessary tasks. But this is bound to fail, says Seppälä. Instead, we need to manage our energy.

She outlines six qualities to cultivate that will contribute to both our productivity and our happiness without making big changes to our schedules:

Full presence: Staying in the moment;

Resilience: Bouncing back from setbacks more quickly;

Calm, rest, self-compassion: Treating ourselves like we would a good friend, with support and care rather than self-criticism;

From the outside, meditation appears to be a thoroughly serious endeavor. You have to sit down, dutifully count your breaths, and practice this every day whether it’s fun or not.

But in Joy on Demand, Chade-Meng Tan teaches practices and principles for cultivating mindfulness that emphasize gentleness, ease, and even humor. Through practices like the Puppy Dog Meditation, Attending to Joy, and Wishing for Random People to Be Happy, Tan offers concrete steps for incorporating mindfulness into everyday life that take as little as one breath.

Though light on research, Joy on Demand benefits from Tan’s first-person perspective and personal experiences. They help bring to life the obstacles and benefits to cultivating mindfulness, making them seem particularly relevant and real. And in the light of Tan’s stories of suffering, his humor and good cheer become all the more meaningful—a testament to the power of meditation to make us happier, more connected, and more resilient.

In Helping Children Succeed, Paul Tough pulls together decades of social science research on the impacts of poverty and trauma on kids’ brains and behavior to make a cogent, convincing argument for why we need to stop blaming kids for their learning difficulties or simply push them to become more “gritty.”

Instead, he explains why kids who come from impoverished or abusive homes can have trouble in school and need more compassionate supports—at home and in the classroom—to help them achieve in school and in life.

Children, like adults, have a basic need for competence, autonomy, and connection, argues Tough. In his book, he points to many of the ways that teachers can encourage students to fulfill these needs in the context of learning, by providing opportunities for challenge and independence in classroom assignments, while still displaying a warm and welcoming atmosphere for all students.

Helping Children Succeed is full of the science of how kids learn, tips for educators and parents, and information about innovative programs that have shown promising results in turning around the lives of at-risk students.

Pride is often considered a negative force in human existence—the opposite of humility and a source of social friction. But in Take Pride, Jessica Tracy argues that pride, like other human emotions, is part of our evolutionary heritage, helping us to survive and thrive in cooperative societies by inspiring us to be the best humans we can be.

Tracy has studied the pride display—chest out, head back, and a slight smile—and found that it is recognizable in cultures around the world, connoting status, encouraging deference from others, and motivating us to work hard to gain approval from our communities. Pride displays communicate expertise and power, helping others to identify leaders in their midst. But pride has a dark side: hubris, or self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.

Tracy warns us to take heed of the difference: If you feel authentic pride and it inspires you to do good by your community’s standards, great. But if you start feeling the need to live up to others’ expectations, and lie or cheat to earn their admiration, chances are you are leaning toward hubris. And that could make the future darker for everyone.

Americans are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and it’s making us miserable, according to Ruth Whippman’s America the Anxious. That’s because we’re going about it the wrong way. Instead of focusing on being happy—which research suggests makes us unhappy—we should focus on living a life of meaning with strong interpersonal relationships, where happiness is a natural by-product.

Whippman’s book is an entertaining account of her explorations into the many ways Americans try to be happier. She attends meditation classes and EST-like programs, visits companies creating artificial workplace communities, and even spends time with a group of Mormons—purported to be the happiest Americans—all to illustrate how pursuing happiness can go horribly wrong.

Instead of seeking personal happiness through dubious means, she argues that we should focus on improving the social supports that science has shown actually contribute to happiness: things like universal healthcare, support for working parents in the form of paid parental leave and quality childcare, and job security for the employed. If we don’t learn to accept the necessity of these in our pursuit of happiness, we are bound to continue being one of the most anxious, unhappy populations in the developed world.

]]>In many ways, 2016 was a banner year for books related to our themes of compassion, kindness, empathy, happiness, and mindfulness. Judging from the number of books to arrive at our office, the science of a meaningful life is hitting its full stride, with more and more people recognizing how to apply new insights to our daily lives. Yet, while the number of books was encouraging, many of them seemed to repeat old themes and research, without offering much new in the way of insight.
That’s why many of our favorite books of 2016 do something a little bit extra: They take our science to a new level, looking at how schools, organizations, and society at large can apply research to create a more successful and compassionate world.
Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior, by Jonah Berger
We’re constantly making decisions about what to buy, wear, believe, and spend our time on. Most of us see these choices as determined by our inherent values and preferences—but according to Wharton professor Jonah Berger’s book Invisible Influence, that is partly an illusion.
In fact, we’re constantly, subconsciously affected by the thoughts and actions of others. Social influence can sometimes be harmful: Groups can easily slide into passive consensus, with whoever speaks first setting the tone of the entire discussion. The culture of certain organizations can make others feel excluded, the way “masculine” academic majors like computer science seem closed to women.
The key, Berger argues, is to use social influence for good. All it takes is one dissenting view to turn a misguided consensus into healthy disagreement. Creating a more diverse environment in your workplace or classroom can help more people feel like they belong, rather than feeling pressure to be the same as everyone else. In the end, recognizing the far-reaching power of social influence can not only make us more self-aware, Berger argues, but can also help us build a better society.&nbsp;
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, by Robert Frank
Though we Americans tend to think that we are the masters of our own destiny and that hard work pays off, we are only partly right: Many of us succeed at work and in life because of luck, too, according to Robert Frank’s book, Success and Luck.
Research shows that the family we are born into (and even birth order), the opportunities available in our neighborhood, the schools we attend, and whether or not we have positive adult mentors—all of which are beyond our individual control—play an important role in whether or not we succeed in life.
Still, many of us buy into the myth of the “self-made man” (or woman) because we are unaware of the many psychological biases we hold that create the illusion of personal merit. The halo effect, hindsight bias, and attribution bias all play a role in making us feel that our success (or that of others) is largely due to character or smarts, rather than to the luck of our personal life circumstances.
Why is it important to recognize this? By clinging too much to the belief that we deserve our fortune, we are less likely to treat others with empathy or fairness. Frank hopes that understanding the role of luck in success will help people to embrace public policies that achieve more fairness for those who’ve been left behind economically through no fault of their own.
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, by Alison Gopnik
Today, many parents and educators work vigilantly to guide children along the “right” path, hoping it will lead to a bright future. Adults naturally believe they know just what that path should look like, often drawing on their own experience or colleagues’ advice. But this top-down approach often leaves parents feeling pressured, educators struggling, and youth stressed and lagging behind their international peers.
In The Gardener and the Carpenter, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik argues against this approach, saying that parents don’t need to “mold” their children; they need to raise them in safe spaces filled with warmth, freedom to explore, and safety nets. Babies and toddlers are keen observers of their world, actively and accurately interpreting what people and objects do and why they do it—like little scientists. Nurturing their exploration is crucial for the human species to innovate, evolve, and adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
The Gardener and the Carpenter is a sophisticated read, not a prescriptive, how-to-parent book. But it does allow a peek under the hood of how children develop and what they really need from the caring adults around them. The book charts a strong, philosophical course, from which specific actions and decisions naturally follow.
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Hochschild
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent five years listening to devoted members of the Tea Party to write Strangers in Their Own Land. Her book helps explain why people who have struggled to survive the indignities of a declining economy and environment might support politicians who want to deregulate industry and cut taxes on the wealthy, giving us insight into the narrative frames and the “hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety” of many working-class Americans.
Hochschild discovers an undeclared class war—but not the one liberals and progressives see, between the one percent and the 99 percent. This class war is between the middle class, the working class—and the poor. According to her interviewees, the federal government is on the wrong side of that war, providing help to the poorest while neglecting everyone else. This opens the door to the kind of resentment that fueled the rise of Donald Trump.
Strangers in Their Own Land doesn’t try to figure out how to solve the world’s problems or bring together a new coalition to address them. Hochschild’s mission is to open a window into the minds and hearts of people who seem alien and irrational to blue-state liberals. It’s up to us to take it from here.
The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, by Dacher Keltner
We tend to believe that attaining power requires force, deception, manipulation, and coercion. But, as seductive as these ideas are, they are dead wrong, according to GGSC co-founder and faculty director Dacher Keltner in his new book, The Power Paradox.
Keltner has spent years studying how people acquire and maintain power in groups and what happens to their behavior after power is granted. What he has discovered is that “empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are force, deception, or terror.” Meaningful influence, the kind that endures, comes from a focus on the needs of others and is not won, but given to us by other people because of our kindness and social intelligence.
Unfortunately, when one becomes powerful in a group, that feeling of power can impair the very skills of social intelligence that are vital to maintaining power and wielding it responsibly. Once people have been granted power, they tend to ignore those around them and become less empathic. This is the power paradox.
How we handle the power paradox guides our personal and work lives and determines, ultimately, how happy we and the people around us will be—and Keltner’s book aims to help us see the impact of power and how we can avoid its pitfalls.
The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success, by Emma Seppälä
In The Happiness Track, Emma Seppälä tries to untangle one of the knottiest problems of the modern age: our burned-out, overscheduled lifestyle. We are stuck in a jumble of feeling overwhelmed yet never accomplishing enough, trussed up by assumptions that we hold about productivity, such as Success requires stress. We have to compete with others. We can’t cut ourselves any slack.
Typically, people who are stressed are advised to manage their time better: Prioritize, make to-do lists, and delegate unnecessary tasks. But this is bound to fail, says Seppälä. Instead, we need to manage our energy.
She outlines six qualities to cultivate that will contribute to both our productivity and our happiness without making big changes to our schedules:
Full presence: Staying in the moment;
Resilience: Bouncing back from setbacks more quickly;
Calm, rest, self-compassion: Treating ourselves like we would a good friend, with support and care rather than self-criticism;
Compassion: Giving to others in need.
Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within, by Chade-Meng Tan
From the outside, meditation appears to be a thoroughly serious endeavor. You have to sit down, dutifully count your breaths, and practice this every day whether it’s fun or not.
But in Joy on Demand, Chade-Meng Tan teaches practices and principles for cultivating mindfulness that emphasize gentleness, ease, and even humor. Through practices like the Puppy Dog Meditation, Attending to Joy, and Wishing for Random People to Be Happy, Tan offers concrete steps for incorporating mindfulness into everyday life that take as little as one breath.
Though light on research, Joy on Demand benefits from Tan’s first-person perspective and personal experiences. They help bring to life the obstacles and benefits to cultivating mindfulness, making them seem particularly relevant and real. And in the light of Tan’s stories of suffering, his humor and good cheer become all the more meaningful—a testament to the power of meditation to make us happier, more connected, and more resilient.
Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why, by Paul Tough
In Helping Children Succeed, Paul Tough pulls together decades of social science research on the impacts of poverty and trauma on kids’ brains and behavior to make a cogent, convincing argument for why we need to stop blaming kids for their learning difficulties or simply push them to become more “gritty.”
Instead, he explains why kids who come from impoverished or abusive homes can have trouble in school and need more compassionate supports—at home and in the classroom—to help them achieve in school and in life.
Children, like adults, have a basic need for competence, autonomy, and connection, argues Tough. In his book, he points to many of the ways that teachers can encourage students to fulfill these needs in the context of learning, by providing opportunities for challenge and independence in classroom assignments, while still displaying a warm and welcoming atmosphere for all students.
Helping Children Succeed is full of the science of how kids learn, tips for educators and parents, and information about innovative programs that have shown promising results in turning around the lives of at-risk students.
Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success, by Jessica Tracy
Pride is often considered a negative force in human existence—the opposite of humility and a source of social friction. But in Take Pride, Jessica Tracy argues that pride, like other human emotions, is part of our evolutionary heritage, helping us to survive and thrive in cooperative societies by inspiring us to be the best humans we can be.
Tracy has studied the pride display—chest out, head back, and a slight smile—and found that it is recognizable in cultures around the world, connoting status, encouraging deference from others, and motivating us to work hard to gain approval from our communities. Pride displays communicate expertise and power, helping others to identify leaders in their midst. But pride has a dark side: hubris, or self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.
Tracy warns us to take heed of the difference: If you feel authentic pride and it inspires you to do good by your community’s standards, great. But if you start feeling the need to live up to others’ expectations, and lie or cheat to earn their admiration, chances are you are leaning toward hubris. And that could make the future darker for everyone.
America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, by Ruth Whippman
Americans are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and it’s making us miserable, according to Ruth Whippman’s America the Anxious. That’s because we’re going about it the wrong way. Instead of focusing on being happy—which research suggests makes us unhappy—we should focus on living a life of meaning with strong interpersonal relationships, where happiness is a natural by-product.
Whippman’s book is an entertaining account of her explorations into the many ways Americans try to be happier. She attends meditation classes and EST-like programs, visits companies creating artificial workplace communities, and even spends time with a group of Mormons—purported to be the happiest Americans—all to illustrate how pursuing happiness can go horribly wrong.
Instead of seeking personal happiness through dubious means, she argues that we should focus on improving the social supports that science has shown actually contribute to happiness: things like universal healthcare, support for working parents in the form of paid parental leave and quality childcare, and job security for the employed. If we don’t learn to accept the necessity of these in our pursuit of happiness, we are bound to continue being one of the most anxious, unhappy populations in the developed world.
&nbsp;altruism, anxiety, children, compassion, emotions, empathy, happiness, luck, mindfulness, parenting, politics, power, social connections, stress, success, Book Reviews, Education, Family & Couples, Work & Career, Mind & Body, Big Ideas, Altruism, Compassion, Empathy, Happiness, Mindfulness2016-12-07T11:06:00+00:00Why Is It So Hard to Make Positive Changes?http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_is_it_so_hard_to_make_positive_changes
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_is_it_so_hard_to_make_positive_changes#When:15:05:00ZHow many of us know people who have trouble stopping behaviors that are causing them physical or emotional harm? How many of us are those people?

If you or someone you know is struggling to make positive change in life, you may want to pick up James and Janice Prochaska’s newest book, Changing to Thrive. James Prochaska, eminent psychologist and founder of the Cancer Prevention Research Center, and Janice Prochaska—both experts in health behavior change—have written a compassionate and informative book for helping people move from being uncommitted to making change all the way to taking action for change and beyond. The Prochaskas’ program has been relatively successful, according to research, often reaching people who might otherwise give up.

The main problem with our current models of change, the authors argue, is that too many professionals ignore the emotional and psychological barriers to change. They assume that if someone is not ready to take action—if they are in what the Prochaskas call “the precontemplation stage” of change—they are immune to programs aimed at helping them. This belief then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“People in precontemplation are often labeled as uncooperative, resistant, unmotivated, or not ready for behavior change programs,” they write. “However, our research showed us that it was the health professionals who were not ready for precontemplators.”

Instead of assuming people don’t want to change when they aren’t taking action, the Prochaskas suggest that helpers (or the people stuck in unhealthy patterns) should address head-on the most common reasons people avoid committing to change:

They don’t know how change works, assuming that it’s an all-or-none process, that isn’t incremental and doesn’t involve setbacks;

They are demoralized, often because of repeated failures that make them feel stuck; and

They are too busy defending their behavior, by denying it’s a problem, rationalizing, withdrawing into a protective stance, or lashing out at others.

All of these barriers, the authors argue, can lead to stagnation; so it’s important to know how to address them before pressing people to take action. Instead of berating people, accusing them of personality defects, or scaring them with statistics, it’s more effective to show understanding and to give them information and hope.

“Providing innovative and more effective solutions for old problems is the best way to generate hope that can lead to the right kind of help,” they write.

Though the Prochaskas’ book goes into some of the research on behavioral change, they are primarily focused on laying out specific steps people can take to make change without getting stuck. Often, they note, the process is non-linear and people encounter psychological barriers—like fear of failure, doubt about the effectiveness of programs, worry about finding the perfect route to change, or the desire for certainty—that keep them from moving forward. Normalizing these reactions to change, giving people ways to reframe fears and disappointments, and providing skills for handling distress are paramount for helping people overcome these barriers, they argue.

Other barriers to change include the serious concerns some people have about the consequences of changing. For example, in a chapter on alcohol abuse, the authors tell the story of a client named David who often drank in the context of work social events. Though he may have worried about the effects on his body of drinking, he was also concerned about how stopping drinking might impact his work relationships. Taking these concerns seriously and creating alternative plans for addressing them—rather than believing that David has to “hit bottom” to change—is a much more compassionate as well as productive means of helping him.

In this example, their route to helping David included accepting his arguments as valid (if misguided), guiding him toward seeing that there were more “pros” than “cons” for stopping drinking, increasing social support in his life for stopping drinking, and making contingency plans for himself if he felt the urge to drink.

Separate chapters in the book are devoted to helping people with the four most common behavioral health issues—smoking, alcohol abuse, overeating, and lack of exercise. While each chapter addresses the underlying psychological barriers to change, they are also full of other tools people can use to help themselves with change.

Taking it one step further, the authors recommend tips for increasing well-being beyond behavioral change. They include several research-based practices to increase positivity in one’s life, including learning relaxation techniques like meditation for decreasing stress, seeking opportunities to feel awe or to witness human nature at its best (to experience “moral elevation”), practicing gratitude, pursuing personal interests, and finding purpose in life. Each of these, they insist, will help those working toward change to not only address problems but to thrive.

While this book is primarily a self-help book—and not dedicated to outlining the research in this area—it’s nonetheless firmly grounded in Prochaska’s well-regarded theories of change. For those who need a boost in getting started on a healthier lifestyle, this book may be just the one for you.

]]>How many of us know people who have trouble stopping behaviors that are causing them physical or emotional harm? How many of us are those people?
If you or someone you know is struggling to make positive change in life, you may want to pick up James and Janice Prochaska’s newest book, Changing to Thrive. James Prochaska, eminent psychologist and founder of the Cancer Prevention Research Center, and Janice Prochaska—both experts in health behavior change—have written a compassionate and informative book for helping people move from being uncommitted to making change all the way to taking action for change and beyond. The Prochaskas’ program has been relatively successful, according to research, often reaching people who might otherwise give up.
The main problem with our current models of change, the authors argue, is that too many professionals ignore the emotional and psychological barriers to change. They assume that if someone is not ready to take action—if they are in what the Prochaskas call “the precontemplation stage” of change—they are immune to programs aimed at helping them. This belief then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“People in precontemplation are often labeled as uncooperative, resistant, unmotivated, or not ready for behavior change programs,” they write. “However, our research showed us that it was the health professionals who were not ready for precontemplators.”
Instead of assuming people don’t want to change when they aren’t taking action, the Prochaskas suggest that helpers (or the people stuck in unhealthy patterns) should address head-on the most common reasons people avoid committing to change:They don’t know how change works, assuming that it’s an all-or-none process, that isn’t incremental and doesn’t involve setbacks;
They are demoralized, often because of repeated failures that make them feel stuck; and
They are too busy defending their behavior, by denying it’s a problem, rationalizing, withdrawing into a protective stance, or lashing out at others.
All of these barriers, the authors argue, can lead to stagnation; so it’s important to know how to address them before pressing people to take action. Instead of berating people, accusing them of personality defects, or scaring them with statistics, it’s more effective to show understanding and to give them information and hope.
“Providing innovative and more effective solutions for old problems is the best way to generate hope that can lead to the right kind of help,” they write.
Though the Prochaskas’ book goes into some of the research on behavioral change, they are primarily focused on laying out specific steps people can take to make change without getting stuck. Often, they note, the process is non-linear and people encounter psychological barriers—like fear of failure, doubt about the effectiveness of programs, worry about finding the perfect route to change, or the desire for certainty—that keep them from moving forward. Normalizing these reactions to change, giving people ways to reframe fears and disappointments, and providing skills for handling distress are paramount for helping people overcome these barriers, they argue.
Other barriers to change include the serious concerns some people have about the consequences of changing. For example, in a chapter on alcohol abuse, the authors tell the story of a client named David who often drank in the context of work social events. Though he may have worried about the effects on his body of drinking, he was also concerned about how stopping drinking might impact his work relationships. Taking these concerns seriously and creating alternative plans for addressing them—rather than believing that David has to “hit bottom” to change—is a much more compassionate as well as productive means of helping him.
In this example, their route to helping David included accepting his arguments as valid (if misguided), guiding him toward seeing that there were more “pros” than “cons” for stopping drinking, increasing social support in his life for stopping drinking, and making contingency plans for himself if he felt the urge to drink.
Separate chapters in the book are devoted to helping people with the four most common behavioral health issues—smoking, alcohol abuse, overeating, and lack of exercise. While each chapter addresses the underlying psychological barriers to change, they are also full of other tools people can use to help themselves with change.
Taking it one step further, the authors recommend tips for increasing well-being beyond behavioral change. They include several research-based practices to increase positivity in one’s life, including learning relaxation techniques like meditation for decreasing stress, seeking opportunities to feel awe or to witness human nature at its best (to experience “moral elevation”), practicing gratitude, pursuing personal interests, and finding purpose in life. Each of these, they insist, will help those working toward change to not only address problems but to thrive.
While this book is primarily a self-help book—and not dedicated to outlining the research in this area—it’s nonetheless firmly grounded in Prochaska’s well-regarded theories of change. For those who need a boost in getting started on a healthier lifestyle, this book may be just the one for you.change, goals, habits, health, willpower, Book Reviews, Happiness2016-12-02T15:05:00+00:00How to Only Do Things You Actually Want to Dohttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_only_do_things_you_actually_want_to_do
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_only_do_things_you_actually_want_to_do#When:13:44:00ZCan you remember the last time your to-do list was short enough to be, well, do-able? How about the last time you looked at your list and actually wanted to do everything on it?

Earlier this spring, I started getting loads of requests for help managing too-long task lists, and so I published this process for organizing them. Ineffective task lists make us feel like we have too much to do in too little time, which makes us feel overwhelmed. Ironically, this makes us worse at planning and managing our time.

You might have a perfectly organized task list, though, that is still triggering overwhelm—I just went through one with a client, and frankly I was exhausted just looking at it. If your task list is sending you into an “I don’t have enough time to do all this” tailspin, it’s time to whittle that puppy down into something more manageable.

This is a different process than organizing your to-do list, or formatting it in a more effective way. This is about shortening that list—dumping the stuff you dread—without suffering the consequences of not doing what you actually have to do to get done.

In an ideal world, we would all be able to apply Marie Kondo’s world-famous principles for cleaning out our closet to our to-do list: Anything that doesn’t “spark joy” we put in the trash (delete) or give away (delegate). Most of my clients start off with very little on their task list that they look forward to doing; one recently declared that she only puts stuff on her to-do list that she doesn’t want to do, because she remembers to do what she actually wants to do.

So here’s how to transform a too-long to-do list into a list of only the things that you actually want to do:

1. Highlight all the items on your to-do list that you dread doing

Hold each task list item in your mind’s eye, and notice how it feels to think about doing that item in your body. Do you lean forward a little, feeling a longing to get right to that task? (Don’t highlight items that feel like that.) Or do you get a sinking feeling in your stomach, with a corresponding desire to put the task off as long as possible? Highlight anything that makes you feel anything akin to aversion.

Highlight all the things that you’ve been procrastinating on because you simply don’t want to do them. And highlight the things that are on your list because you feel like you “should” do them, or because you feel like you have to do them, but that you don’t want to do or wouldn’t say you are choosing to do (or wouldn’t say with some delight that you “get” to do).

In other words, highlight the things you plan to do simply because someone expects you to do them, or because you’ve always expected yourself to do those things, or because doing them would bring you status or power (but no actual joy in the process).

2. Delete or delegate as many highlighted items as you possibly can

Start by deleting, then move on to delegating. Be truthful here; if you know in your heart of hearts that you’ll probably never do a task item anyway, or that there will be little consequence if you don’t do a highlighted item on your list, just scratch it off the list and be done with it.

You may feel relieved, or even accomplished (given that your list is getting shorter so quickly!). Or, you may feel anxious or even sad while doing this. Acknowledge your emotions, whatever they may be, as you madly delete items from your task list. Be curious about whatever you are feeling, and accepting of your emotions—but no need to get involved in them.

Maybe you need to mourn (a little tiny bit) the fact that you are never going to make those photo albums (that you hate making but really felt like you should make). It’s normal to feel sad, or a sense of regret—but also, be real: You aren’t grieving anything tangible; you’re grieving the loss of a fantasy. For example, you’re giving up the fantasy that you are the type of person who makes photo albums. Or who writes strategic plans. Or who answers every single email. Oh, well. Let yourself feel what you feel, and move on. This is a process of letting go.

If a highlighted task is something that absolutely does need to be done and thus can’t just be deleted, try to think of someone else who’d actually enjoy doing it, and make a plan for how you can delegate it to that person. If you don’t have an assistant or employees or children to delegate to, consider neighborhood teens and retirees who’d like experience, your company, or a little extra cash. Or, think of people who need help with something you enjoy doing, and negotiate a trade with them.

All of this may seem like a lot more work than just doing the task yourself, but I promise, you will thank me later. Having a task list that is both short enough to not be overwhelming and that is loaded with things you’ll enjoy doing is worth the initial inefficiency.

3. Transform anything left on your list that is highlighted into something that you actually want to do

If you can’t delete or delegate tasks that you dread, then you’ll have to make them better. Be creative. My favorite way to do this is to pair a not-fun task item with something you want to do more of. I’ve been known to sit on the lawn in the sun and make doctor appointments, and I listen to fun audiobooks while driving to pick up kids and while cleaning the house (I just listened to A Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes and I highly recommend it). My co-worker and I have been putting off reviewing our financial systems for, oh, years, but we just made a plan to do it together this summer poolside. There will be margaritas involved, and, needless to say, we aren’t dreading the task anymore!

Understanding the value a task has for other people is another good way to make it more fulfilling (thus decreasing the dread factor). In a stunning series of studies, Adam Grant found that briefly showing people how their work helps others increases not only how happy people are on the job but also how much they work and accomplish.

Grant’s most famous series of studies were conducted at a call center with paid fundraisers tasked with phoning potential donors to a public university. As anyone who’s ever dreaded making a cold call knows, these people probably did not have the to-do list of their dreams. People receiving cold calls from solicitors are often annoyed and can be downright rude. Employees must endure frequent rejection on the phone and low morale at the office—all in exchange for relatively low pay. Not surprisingly, call center jobs often have a high staff turnover rate.

In an effort to see if he could motivate call center fundraisers to stay on the job longer, Grant brought in a few scholarship students (who presumably had benefited from the fundraisers’ work) for a five-minute meeting where callers could ask them questions about their classes and experience at the university. In the next month, that quick conversation yielded unbelievable results. Callers who had met the scholarship students spent twice as long on the phone as the fundraisers who had not met any students. They accomplished far more, bringing in an average of 171 percent more money.

What made the difference? What, essentially, shifted the task of making cold calls from one people didn’t enjoy to one that they did? A shift in the callers’ beliefs about the meaning of their work for other people, and an increased sense of their purpose, value, and impact. So find out what value your work has for other people. How are you making their lives or jobs better?

Voila!

You’ve just Marie Kondo-ed your task list! Everything left on it is now the stuff you actually want to do, the tasks that “spark joy.” If you’re like my client who doesn’t need to keep a list of the things she wants to do, you no longer need to keep a to-do list at all—you just need to remember to delete, delegate, or transform the things you don’t want to do.

]]>Can you remember the last time your to-do list was short enough to be, well, do-able? How about the last time you looked at your list and actually wanted to do everything on it?
Earlier this spring, I started getting loads of requests for help managing too-long task lists, and so I published this process for organizing them. Ineffective task lists make us feel like we have too much to do in too little time, which makes us feel overwhelmed. Ironically, this makes us worse at planning and managing our time.
You might have a perfectly organized task list, though, that is still triggering overwhelm—I just went through one with a client, and frankly I was exhausted just looking at it. If your task list is sending you into an “I don’t have enough time to do all this” tailspin, it’s time to whittle that puppy down into something more manageable.
This is a different process than organizing your to-do list, or formatting it in a more effective way. This is about shortening that list—dumping the stuff you dread—without suffering the consequences of not doing what you actually have to do to get done.
In an ideal world, we would all be able to apply Marie Kondo’s world-famous principles for cleaning out our closet to our to-do list: Anything that doesn’t “spark joy” we put in the trash (delete) or give away (delegate). Most of my clients start off with very little on their task list that they look forward to doing; one recently declared that she only puts stuff on her to-do list that she doesn’t want to do, because she remembers to do what she actually wants to do.
So here’s how to transform a too-long to-do list into a list of only the things that you actually want to do:
1. Highlight all the items on your to-do list that you dread doing
Hold each task list item in your mind’s eye, and notice how it feels to think about doing that item in your body. Do you lean forward a little, feeling a longing to get right to that task? (Don’t highlight items that feel like that.) Or do you get a sinking feeling in your stomach, with a corresponding desire to put the task off as long as possible? Highlight anything that makes you feel anything akin to aversion.
Highlight all the things that you’ve been procrastinating on because you simply don’t want to do them. And highlight the things that are on your list because you feel like you “should” do them, or because you feel like you have to do them, but that you don’t want to do or wouldn’t say you are choosing to do (or wouldn’t say with some delight that you “get” to do).
In other words, highlight the things you plan to do simply because someone expects you to do them, or because you’ve always expected yourself to do those things, or because doing them would bring you status or power (but no actual joy in the process).
2. Delete or delegate as many highlighted items as you possibly can
Start by deleting, then move on to delegating. Be truthful here; if you know in your heart of hearts that you’ll probably never do a task item anyway, or that there will be little consequence if you don’t do a highlighted item on your list, just scratch it off the list and be done with it.
You may feel relieved, or even accomplished (given that your list is getting shorter so quickly!). Or, you may feel anxious or even sad while doing this. Acknowledge your emotions, whatever they may be, as you madly delete items from your task list. Be curious about whatever you are feeling, and accepting of your emotions—but no need to get involved in them.
Maybe you need to mourn (a little tiny bit) the fact that you are never going to make those photo albums (that you hate making but really felt like you should make). It’s normal to feel sad, or a sense of regret—but also, be real: You aren’t grieving anything tangible; you’re grieving the loss of a fantasy. For example, you’re giving up the fantasy that you are the type of person who makes photo albums. Or who writes strategic plans. Or who answers every single email. Oh, well. Let yourself feel what you feel, and move on. This is a process of letting go.
If a highlighted task is something that absolutely does need to be done and thus can’t just be deleted, try to think of someone else who’d actually enjoy doing it, and make a plan for how you can delegate it to that person. If you don’t have an assistant or employees or children to delegate to, consider neighborhood teens and retirees who’d like experience, your company, or a little extra cash. Or, think of people who need help with something you enjoy doing, and negotiate a trade with them.
All of this may seem like a lot more work than just doing the task yourself, but I promise, you will thank me later. Having a task list that is both short enough to not be overwhelming and that is loaded with things you’ll enjoy doing is worth the initial inefficiency.
3. Transform anything left on your list that is highlighted into something that you actually want to do
If you can’t delete or delegate tasks that you dread, then you’ll have to make them better. Be creative. My favorite way to do this is to pair a not-fun task item with something you want to do more of. I’ve been known to sit on the lawn in the sun and make doctor appointments, and I listen to fun audiobooks while driving to pick up kids and while cleaning the house (I just listened to A Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes and I highly recommend it). My co-worker and I have been putting off reviewing our financial systems for, oh, years, but we just made a plan to do it together this summer poolside. There will be margaritas involved, and, needless to say, we aren’t dreading the task anymore!
Understanding the value a task has for other people is another good way to make it more fulfilling (thus decreasing the dread factor). In a stunning series of studies, Adam Grant found that briefly showing people how their work helps others increases not only how happy people are on the job but also how much they work and accomplish.
Grant’s most famous series of studies were conducted at a call center with paid fundraisers tasked with phoning potential donors to a public university. As anyone who’s ever dreaded making a cold call knows, these people probably did not have the to-do list of their dreams. People receiving cold calls from solicitors are often annoyed and can be downright rude. Employees must endure frequent rejection on the phone and low morale at the office—all in exchange for relatively low pay. Not surprisingly, call center jobs often have a high staff turnover rate.
In an effort to see if he could motivate call center fundraisers to stay on the job longer, Grant brought in a few scholarship students (who presumably had benefited from the fundraisers’ work) for a five-minute meeting where callers could ask them questions about their classes and experience at the university. In the next month, that quick conversation yielded unbelievable results. Callers who had met the scholarship students spent twice as long on the phone as the fundraisers who had not met any students. They accomplished far more, bringing in an average of 171 percent more money.
What made the difference? What, essentially, shifted the task of making cold calls from one people didn’t enjoy to one that they did? A shift in the callers’ beliefs about the meaning of their work for other people, and an increased sense of their purpose, value, and impact. So find out what value your work has for other people. How are you making their lives or jobs better?
Voila!
You’ve just Marie Kondo-ed your task list! Everything left on it is now the stuff you actually want to do, the tasks that “spark joy.” If you’re like my client who doesn’t need to keep a list of the things she wants to do, you no longer need to keep a to-do list at all—you just need to remember to delete, delegate, or transform the things you don’t want to do.happiness, productivity, stress, work, Features, Work & Career, Happiness2016-11-29T13:44:00+00:00How to Journal Through Your Struggleshttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_journal_through_your_struggles
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_journal_through_your_struggles#When:11:22:00ZDo you keep a diary in good times or bad? According to researchers James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth, most journalers tend to fall squarely in one of the two categories: Either they write regularly until adversity hits, then can’t continue; or they only put pen to paper when they’re feeling down.

I fall in the latter category, and at some point I worried that my journals were getting pretty grim. Did I really want to look back and read tales of stress, uncertainty, and loss? But it turns out I was inadvertently engaging in a practice called Expressive Writing, one that has been the subject of hundreds of studies in the past thirty years. And according to that body of research, writing about your deepest struggles can have a positive impact on health and well-being.

In a new edition of their book Opening Up by Writing It Down, Pennebaker and Smyth survey the scientific history of Expressive Writing, its benefits, and how to make it work for you. When you feel stuck, this powerful writing practice can get all those painful thoughts and feelings out of your head, starting the process of healing.

How to do Expressive Writing

The basic instructions for Expressive Writing go something like this: Write continuously for 20 minutes about your deepest emotions and thoughts surrounding an emotional challenge in your life. In your writing, really let go and explore the event and how it has affected you. You might tie it to your childhood, your relationship with your parents, people you have loved, or even your career.

To get the most out of this exercise, it helps to carve out quiet time and space to go deep. The goal is to gain insights and see new connections among your feelings, not to just vent with a pen. Although study participants sometimes write about big traumas and shameful secrets—from child abuse to their experiences at war—you can also write about whatever is frustrating or preoccupying you at the moment.

For example, here are some variations on Expressive Writing that Pennebaker and Smyth recommend:

Writing for Problem Solving: Write for 10 minutes about a personal problem, then read your writing and identify the key obstacles you’re facing. Write about those obstacles for another 10 minutes and again read your writing. Finally, write for 10 more minutes synthesizing what you’ve learned.

Before bed, journal about your worries and concerns—you might find that you fall asleep faster!

Write down the word “Stress,” and do a word association: What word or topic does it bring to mind? What word or topic does that new one bring to mind? Do this successively and then see if you can gain insight into what stress means to you.

Although the traditional advice is to write for 20 minutes, four days in a row, research suggests that even writing for a few minutes can be beneficial. Pennebaker and Smyth do recommend trying at least two sessions, even if you only wait 10 minutes in between, because that break time allows your brain to process and integrate. Although some people choose to explore the same issue over and over, finding new angles every time, others write about different topics during each session.

Could Expressive Writing ever be harmful? Researchers are still trying to figure out exactly who benefits the most from this practice. Some evidence, by no means conclusive, suggests that it’s most helpful to people who have the least opportunity or inclination to disclose their feelings in daily life; other research suggests that Expressive Writing might not be helpful when the trauma is too recent or ongoing.

For now, you are your best guide here; if writing feels right, do it. If you don’t feel like you’re ready, or writing feels ruminative, or if it’s keeping you from making important changes in your life, then it might not be doing you any good.

Why practice Expressive Writing?

As you might imagine, sitting down and writing about fear, sadness, or anger isn’t the most pleasant experience—which is perhaps why even some regular diary writers can’t bring themselves to do it. Studies do suggest that Expressive Writing can make you feel sad and anxious immediately afterward, but the long-term effects are a different story.

In the earliest studies of Expressive Writing, researchers invited participants to write about a trauma in their life or about superficial topics for four days in a row. Compared to the superficial writers, the expressive writers felt a greater sense of meaning afterward, showed better immune function six weeks later, and had fewer doctor visits in the half year following the experiment. Exactly how Expressive Writing improves health is still being explored today, decades later, but it essentially appears to buffer against the deleterious effects of stress and rumination.

Expressive Writing could even help you get a job. In another study, engineers who had recently been laid off wrote about their thoughts and feelings around the layoff. Seven months later, more than half of them had a new job—three times as many compared to groups who wrote about time management or didn’t write at all. The participants in each group went on roughly the same number of interviews, so what was going on? Researchers believed that the Expressive Writing engineers had worked through their anger, so they probably made a better impression in interviews when discussing their former employer.

Expressive Writing might be useful after another major life change: entering college. Research suggests that it can help new students cope with the transition to university, with health benefits lasting up to four months. In fact, it can even improve working memory as well as grades and standardized test scores—good news for stressed-out freshmen.

Why does Expressive Writing work?

“We still don’t have a solid explanation of why [Expressive Writing] does and doesn’t work,” admit Pennebaker and Smyth. But preliminary studies, and comments from scores of study participants, are starting to piece together a story: There’s something powerful about translating our experiences into words—and not keeping them buried inside.

In the famous book Getting Things Done, author David Allen argues that to-do lists are essential because they get tasks out of our heads, freeing up space for more important thoughts; our creative ideas no longer have to jostle for attention alongside “buy lettuce at ShopRite.”

A similar process may be going on with negative experiences, Pennebaker and Smyth suggest. If we let painful thoughts rattle around in our heads, they seem to constantly resurface and demand our attention, hoping to be resolved and processed. “One reason we often obsess about a disturbing experience is that we are trying to understand it,” they explain.

When we finally sit down and try to make sense of it in writing, we may find that our thoughts settle down. Our experience becomes more of a narrative, and we can observe it with a bit more detachment. That frees up the mind for healthier things, like getting a good night’s sleep and really connecting with others.

When we put our thoughts and feelings down on paper, we’re not just transferring them—we’re also transforming them. Writing forces us to arrange our ideas into a sequence, one after another; over time, themes and patterns start to emerge; new insights and perspectives start to bubble up: Ah yes, that’s why I felt so hurt when she said that or This has happened before—why do I seem to be sabotaging myself?

Researchers have done textual analysis on Expressive Writing samples, and they found a fascinating pattern: The participants who see the most benefits use an increasing number of cognitive words—effect, reason, realize, know—in successive writing sessions. You can literally see them shifting from feeling and suffering to thinking and understanding over time. (Interestingly, the ones who use lots of cognitive words from the very beginning don’t fare well; they seem to be stuck in a rut, not engaging as deeply with their feelings.)

Of course, as the authors admit, the best thing we can do in times of trouble is to share our thoughts and feelings with people we trust. But that isn’t always possible; sometimes a secret isn’t ours to share, or we’re too fearful of how others will respond. In those cases, writing is the next best thing: a way to share without sharing, to disclose without judgment, to process in private. And if your journal looks a bit like mine—struggle after struggle—that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

]]>Do you keep a diary in good times or bad? According to researchers James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth, most journalers tend to fall squarely in one of the two categories: Either they write regularly until adversity hits, then can’t continue; or they only put pen to paper when they’re feeling down.
I fall in the latter category, and at some point I worried that my journals were getting pretty grim. Did I really want to look back and read tales of stress, uncertainty, and loss? But it turns out I was inadvertently engaging in a practice called Expressive Writing, one that has been the subject of hundreds of studies in the past thirty years. And according to that body of research, writing about your deepest struggles can have a positive impact on health and well-being.
In a new edition of their book Opening Up by Writing It Down, Pennebaker and Smyth survey the scientific history of Expressive Writing, its benefits, and how to make it work for you. When you feel stuck, this powerful writing practice can get all those painful thoughts and feelings out of your head, starting the process of healing.
How to do Expressive Writing
The basic instructions for Expressive Writing go something like this: Write continuously for 20 minutes about your deepest emotions and thoughts surrounding an emotional challenge in your life. In your writing, really let go and explore the event and how it has affected you. You might tie it to your childhood, your relationship with your parents, people you have loved, or even your career.
To get the most out of this exercise, it helps to carve out quiet time and space to go deep. The goal is to gain insights and see new connections among your feelings, not to just vent with a pen. Although study participants sometimes write about big traumas and shameful secrets—from child abuse to their experiences at war—you can also write about whatever is frustrating or preoccupying you at the moment.&nbsp;
For example, here are some variations on Expressive Writing that Pennebaker and Smyth recommend:Writing for Problem Solving: Write for 10 minutes about a personal problem, then read your writing and identify the key obstacles you’re facing. Write about those obstacles for another 10 minutes and again read your writing. Finally, write for 10 more minutes synthesizing what you’ve learned.
Before bed, journal about your worries and concerns—you might find that you fall asleep faster!
Write down the word “Stress,” and do a word association: What word or topic does it bring to mind? What word or topic does that new one bring to mind? Do this successively and then see if you can gain insight into what stress means to you.
Although the traditional advice is to write for 20 minutes, four days in a row, research suggests that even writing for a few minutes can be beneficial. Pennebaker and Smyth do recommend trying at least two sessions, even if you only wait 10 minutes in between, because that break time allows your brain to process and integrate. Although some people choose to explore the same issue over and over, finding new angles every time, others write about different topics during each session.&nbsp;
Could Expressive Writing ever be harmful? Researchers are still trying to figure out exactly who benefits the most from this practice. Some evidence, by no means conclusive, suggests that it’s most helpful to people who have the least opportunity or inclination to disclose their feelings in daily life; other research suggests that Expressive Writing might not be helpful when the trauma is too recent or ongoing.
For now, you are your best guide here; if writing feels right, do it. If you don’t feel like you’re ready, or writing feels ruminative, or if it’s keeping you from making important changes in your life, then it might not be doing you any good.
Why practice Expressive Writing?
As you might imagine, sitting down and writing about fear, sadness, or anger isn’t the most pleasant experience—which is perhaps why even some regular diary writers can’t bring themselves to do it. Studies do suggest that Expressive Writing can make you feel sad and anxious immediately afterward, but the long-term effects are a different story.
In the earliest studies of Expressive Writing, researchers invited participants to write about a trauma in their life or about superficial topics for four days in a row. Compared to the superficial writers, the expressive writers felt a greater sense of meaning afterward, showed better immune function six weeks later, and had fewer doctor visits in the half year following the experiment. Exactly how Expressive Writing improves health is still being explored today, decades later, but it essentially appears to buffer against the deleterious effects of stress and rumination.
Expressive Writing could even help you get a job. In another study, engineers who had recently been laid off wrote about their thoughts and feelings around the layoff. Seven months later, more than half of them had a new job—three times as many compared to groups who wrote about time management or didn’t write at all. The participants in each group went on roughly the same number of interviews, so what was going on? Researchers believed that the Expressive Writing engineers had worked through their anger, so they probably made a better impression in interviews when discussing their former employer.
Expressive Writing might be useful after another major life change: entering college. Research suggests that it can help new students cope with the transition to university, with health benefits lasting up to four months. In fact, it can even improve working memory as well as grades and standardized test scores—good news for stressed-out freshmen.
The most exciting benefits of Expressive Writing may be for people who suffer from mental health issues or chronic disease. According to one study, people suffering from depression may see reductions in their symptoms up to one month after trying this practice, and there’s also some evidence that it could help with post-traumatic stress disorder. Expressive Writing may bring relief to those with asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and irritable bowel syndrome; help people reduce their high blood pressure; boost immune function in patients with HIV; and improve quality of life for cancer and heart attack patients.
Why does Expressive Writing work?
“We still don’t have a solid explanation of why [Expressive Writing] does and doesn’t work,” admit Pennebaker and Smyth. But preliminary studies, and comments from scores of study participants, are starting to piece together a story: There’s something powerful about translating our experiences into words—and not keeping them buried inside.
In the famous book Getting Things Done, author David Allen argues that to-do lists are essential because they get tasks out of our heads, freeing up space for more important thoughts; our creative ideas no longer have to jostle for attention alongside “buy lettuce at ShopRite.”
A similar process may be going on with negative experiences, Pennebaker and Smyth suggest. If we let painful thoughts rattle around in our heads, they seem to constantly resurface and demand our attention, hoping to be resolved and processed. “One reason we often obsess about a disturbing experience is that we are trying to understand it,” they explain.
When we finally sit down and try to make sense of it in writing, we may find that our thoughts settle down. Our experience becomes more of a narrative, and we can observe it with a bit more detachment. That frees up the mind for healthier things, like getting a good night’s sleep and really connecting with others.
When we put our thoughts and feelings down on paper, we’re not just transferring them—we’re also transforming them. Writing forces us to arrange our ideas into a sequence, one after another; over time, themes and patterns start to emerge; new insights and perspectives start to bubble up: Ah yes, that’s why I felt so hurt when she said that or This has happened before—why do I seem to be sabotaging myself?
Researchers have done textual analysis on Expressive Writing samples, and they found a fascinating pattern: The participants who see the most benefits use an increasing number of cognitive words—effect, reason, realize, know—in successive writing sessions. You can literally see them shifting from feeling and suffering to thinking and understanding over time. (Interestingly, the ones who use lots of cognitive words from the very beginning don’t fare well; they seem to be stuck in a rut, not engaging as deeply with their feelings.)
Of course, as the authors admit, the best thing we can do in times of trouble is to share our thoughts and feelings with people we trust. But that isn’t always possible; sometimes a secret isn’t ours to share, or we’re too fearful of how others will respond. In those cases, writing is the next best thing: a way to share without sharing, to disclose without judgment, to process in private. And if your journal looks a bit like mine—struggle after struggle—that’s nothing to be ashamed of.health, resilience, stress, writing, Book Reviews, Mind & Body, Happiness2016-11-17T11:22:00+00:00People Who Trust Technology Are Happierhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/people_who_trust_technology_are_happier
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/people_who_trust_technology_are_happier#When:12:27:00ZA vast body of research suggests that religious people are happier and more satisfied with their lives, partly thanks to a greater sense of purpose and belonging. However, belief in God has declined over the past few decades in Western societies. What else, then, may people be turning to for security?

In a recent study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, researchers Olga Stavrova, Daniel Ehlebracht, and Detlef Fetchenhauer hypothesized that a belief in scientific and technological progress has risen to fill this need.

People who strongly believe in scientific-technological progress have faith that science and technology can help humanity build a better future. They’re more likely to think that science and technology make our lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable; create more opportunities for the next generation; and make the world better off.

The researchers first surveyed individuals in the Netherlands about this belief and about their Western religious faith, measured by how often they attended religious services, and whether they identified as religious and believed in God. They found that people who more strongly believed in scientific-technological progress or religion were more satisfied with their lives—but the link was significantly stronger among those who had faith the former.

When they looked at data from 72 countries, the researchers found that respondents with greater faith in science and technology were more satisfied with their lives in all but three countries; by comparison, being religious was positively associated with life satisfaction in only 28 countries—and linked to lower life satisfaction in five.

What gives the belief in scientific-technological progress that extra influence?

Other researchers have recently proposed that a secular belief in human progress to reform the world, including faith in science and technology, gives us a sense of control. So Stavrova and her colleagues also asked participants about their sense of personal control: How much agency and influence did it feel like they had over their lives?

It turned out that people with greater trust in science and technology indeed tended to have a heightened sense of personal control—which was, in turn, linked to their higher life satisfaction. This suggests that scientific understanding and use of technology may help us feel more in control of our environment and our future, buffering us against existential anxiety and leading to greater well-being. On the other hand, people who reported being more religious had a weaker sense of personal control.

What does this all mean for us? Is the study suggesting that a belief in science is better than a belief in religion?

Interestingly, the researchers found that people who believe in science and technology are not less likely to be religious, suggesting that the two aren’t necessarily incompatible. Both values can coexist and benefit us in different ways. Previous studies have found that people who are more religious tend to have a greater sense of “secondary control,” the kind of strength we get from being able to accept and adjust to difficult circumstances. Future research can try to pin down how these two beliefs interact, and look into other religions such as Islam.

In the end, community may play an important role in how our beliefs support our well-being. In the international study, the research team found that the link between scientific-technological faith and life satisfaction was stronger in countries where this belief was popular. Similar patterns have been found when it comes to religion as well—being religious is more strongly linked to well-being in more religious countries.

The specific beliefs we hold, it seems, may be less important than the fact that they are shared.

]]>A vast body of research suggests that religious people are happier and more satisfied with their lives, partly thanks to a greater sense of purpose and belonging. However, belief in God has declined over the past few decades in Western societies. What else, then, may people be turning to for security?
In a recent study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, researchers Olga Stavrova, Daniel Ehlebracht, and Detlef Fetchenhauer hypothesized that a belief in scientific and technological progress has risen to fill this need.
People who strongly believe in scientific-technological progress have faith that science and technology can help humanity build a better future. They’re more likely to think that science and technology make our lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable; create more opportunities for the next generation; and make the world better off.
The researchers first surveyed individuals in the Netherlands about this belief and about their Western religious faith, measured by how often they attended religious services, and whether they identified as religious and believed in God. They found that people who more strongly believed in scientific-technological progress or religion were more satisfied with their lives—but the link was significantly stronger among those who had faith the former.
When they looked at data from 72 countries, the researchers found that respondents with greater faith in science and technology were more satisfied with their lives in all but three countries; by comparison, being religious was positively associated with life satisfaction in only 28 countries—and linked to lower life satisfaction in five.
What gives the belief in scientific-technological progress that extra influence?
Other researchers have recently proposed that a secular belief in human progress to reform the world, including faith in science and technology, gives us a sense of control. So Stavrova and her colleagues also asked participants about their sense of personal control: How much agency and influence did it feel like they had over their lives?
It turned out that people with greater trust in science and technology indeed tended to have a heightened sense of personal control—which was, in turn, linked to their higher life satisfaction. This suggests that scientific understanding and use of technology may help us feel more in control of our environment and our future, buffering us against existential anxiety and leading to greater well-being. On the other hand, people who reported being more religious had a weaker sense of personal control.
What does this all mean for us? Is the study suggesting that a belief in science is better than a belief in religion?
Interestingly, the researchers found that people who believe in science and technology are not less likely to be religious, suggesting that the two aren’t necessarily incompatible. Both values can coexist and benefit us in different ways. Previous studies have found that people who are more religious tend to have a greater sense of “secondary control,” the kind of strength we get from being able to accept and adjust to difficult circumstances. Future research can try to pin down how these two beliefs interact, and look into other religions such as Islam.
In the end, community may play an important role in how our beliefs support our well-being. In the international study, the research team found that the link between scientific-technological faith and life satisfaction was stronger in countries where this belief was popular. Similar patterns have been found when it comes to religion as well—being religious is more strongly linked to well-being in more religious countries.
The specific beliefs we hold, it seems, may be less important than the fact that they are shared.happiness, religion, technology, In Brief, Mind & Body, Happiness2016-10-20T12:27:00+00:00Four Steps to Feeling Better about Yourselfhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_steps_to_feeling_better_about_yourself
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_steps_to_feeling_better_about_yourself#When:10:29:00ZWhat gives you a sense of self-worth?

Data from my well-being survey recently revealed that positive self-views (or feeling good about oneself, a general belief that we are good, worthwhile human beings) were the best predictor of happiness—even more so than 19 other emotional processes including gratitude and strong personal relationships. Positive self-views emerge from self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-worth, among other things.

Why are positive self-views so essential to well-being? Because these views not only affect how we feel; they also affect our thoughts and behaviors. When we feel bad about ourselves, we unconsciously act in ways that end up confirming our beliefs. For example, if we feel like we are not good enough for a good relationship, a good job, or financial stability, we stop pursuing these goals with the intensity required to reach them, or we sabotage ourselves along the way.

So how do we break out of the negative cycle? Below I highlight four ways that you can start to promote positive self-views and begin to change the patterns of your life.

1. Figure out your needs

When we don’t feel good about ourselves, it’s easy to think that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us; it feels deeply rooted and unchangeable. In reality, though, we may have failed to clarify (and then pursue) exactly what would make us feel like a person that we could love.

People tend to feel badly about themselves when they feel powerless to get their needs met—so you can start this process by figuring out what your needs are. But be careful: It’s important that we don’t start demanding that the people in our lives fulfill our every want. Rather, clarify for yourself what you need. What people, places, or experiences are must-haves to live a fulfilling life? What aspects of your life—if removed—would leave you without a sense of purpose? Really think carefully about this and try not to consider others’ needs right now.

Now, every person has different needs. For example, many people feel that they need to have children; this is one of those things that they need to do in this life to feel whole. Other people need to travel. I personally need to love what I do for a living. Without this, my life would feel meaningless to me. But everyone is different.

If you’re having a hard time figuring out your needs, just reflect on times in your life when you weren’t thriving. What was missing?

2. Live authentically

You figured out your needs already, right? If your needs are being met, this step is easy. Just keep them in mind, and don’t stray too far from living a life that is authentically yours.

But what if your needs aren’t being met? You have to start thinking about how you will communicate your needs, how you will start creating a life that meets your needs, and what you will do if people in your life can’t meet those needs.

This step was really hard for me. I discovered that some of my core needs were not being met. It was easier in many ways to just go with the flow than to be more direct about exactly what I needed and exactly what would happen in the future if those needs weren’t met. I drew some scary lines in the sand and clarified for myself exactly what my deal breakers were—deal breakers for my friendships, my marriage, and my work life. At the same time, I discovered that I had been pushing to get my wants met, even though they were not so important. I prioritized, focused, and communicated my needs with brutal honesty, and I let everything else go.

It’s funny how standing up for yourself and living a life that is authentically yours generates positive self-views. I now have more positive views of myself because I pushed for what matters to me. It was terrifying to put myself first, but it was worth it.

3. Forgive yourself

Now that you understand your needs and have a plan for getting them met, you are on your way to feeling that sense of self-assuredness that comes from having control over your own life. You’re moving in the right direction. But what about those past mistakes? You know, those things you’re not so proud of? Almost everyone has said something hurtful, forgotten an important event, or betrayed someone they love.

We have to remember that our mistakes do not define us. They do not make us good people or bad people. If we learn and grow from them, then they make us better people. To develop positive self-views, you must keep in mind that everyone makes mistakes. Forgive yourself, and give yourself credit for trying not to make the same mistakes again.

4. Celebrate your quirks

Each of us is one of a kind. When we cherish our eccentricities and celebrate our flaws, we begin to develop a deep love for ourselves just as we are. Instead of focusing on all the things wrong with us, self-celebration enables us to derive deep satisfaction from being uniquely us. Practice self-celebration by enjoying your awkward laugh or poking fun at your inability to remember people’s names. Or you can do as I do, and smile big for pictures to show off your buck tooth.

While celebrating your quirks, don’t forget to keep growing. Keep your eyes and ears open to the people you trust. Listen when they tell you that you have work to do on yourself. It doesn’t make you bad, just human. People you care about will be the ones that help you distinguish between flaws that need acceptance and flaws that need fixing. (Remember, you want others to get their needs met, too.) This part is crucial, and it keeps us from sliding out of self-love and into complacency.

In sum, feeling positively about ourselves takes effort. But by changing our views, we can change our lives.

]]>What gives you a sense of self-worth?
Data from my well-being survey recently revealed that positive self-views (or feeling good about oneself, a general belief that we are good, worthwhile human beings) were the best predictor of happiness—even more so than 19 other emotional processes including gratitude and strong personal relationships. Positive self-views emerge from self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-worth, among other things.
Why are positive self-views so essential to well-being? Because these views not only affect how we feel; they also affect our thoughts and behaviors. When we feel bad about ourselves, we unconsciously act in ways that end up confirming our beliefs. For example, if we feel like we are not good enough for a good relationship, a good job, or financial stability, we stop pursuing these goals with the intensity required to reach them, or we sabotage ourselves along the way.
So how do we break out of the negative cycle? Below I highlight four ways that you can start to promote positive self-views and begin to change the patterns of your life.
1. Figure out your needs
When we don’t feel good about ourselves, it’s easy to think that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us; it feels deeply rooted and unchangeable. In reality, though, we may have failed to clarify (and then pursue) exactly what would make us feel like a person that we could love.
People tend to feel badly about themselves when they feel powerless to get their needs met—so you can start this process by figuring out what your needs are. But be careful: It’s important that we don’t start demanding that the people in our lives fulfill our every want. Rather, clarify for yourself what you need. What people, places, or experiences are must-haves to live a fulfilling life? What aspects of your life—if removed—would leave you without a sense of purpose? Really think carefully about this and try not to consider others’ needs right now.
Now, every person has different needs. For example, many people feel that they need to have children; this is one of those things that they need to do in this life to feel whole. Other people need to travel. I personally need to love what I do for a living. Without this, my life would feel meaningless to me. But everyone is different.
If you’re having a hard time figuring out your needs, just reflect on times in your life when you weren’t thriving. What was missing?
2. Live authentically
You figured out your needs already, right? If your needs are being met, this step is easy. Just keep them in mind, and don’t stray too far from living a life that is authentically yours.
But what if your needs aren’t being met? You have to start thinking about how you will communicate your needs, how you will start creating a life that meets your needs, and what you will do if people in your life can’t meet those needs.
This step was really hard for me. I discovered that some of my core needs were not being met. It was easier in many ways to just go with the flow than to be more direct about exactly what I needed and exactly what would happen in the future if those needs weren’t met. I drew some scary lines in the sand and clarified for myself exactly what my deal breakers were—deal breakers for my friendships, my marriage, and my work life. At the same time, I discovered that I had been pushing to get my wants met, even though they were not so important. I prioritized, focused, and communicated my needs with brutal honesty, and I let everything else go.
It’s funny how standing up for yourself and living a life that is authentically yours generates positive self-views. I now have more positive views of myself because I pushed for what matters to me. It was terrifying to put myself first, but it was worth it.
3. Forgive yourself
Now that you understand your needs and have a plan for getting them met, you are on your way to feeling that sense of self-assuredness that comes from having control over your own life. You’re moving in the right direction. But what about those past mistakes? You know, those things you’re not so proud of? Almost everyone has said something hurtful, forgotten an important event, or betrayed someone they love.
We have to remember that our mistakes do not define us. They do not make us good people or bad people. If we learn and grow from them, then they make us better people. To develop positive self-views, you must keep in mind that everyone makes mistakes. Forgive yourself, and give yourself credit for trying not to make the same mistakes again.
4. Celebrate your quirks
Each of us is one of a kind. When we cherish our eccentricities and celebrate our flaws, we begin to develop a deep love for ourselves just as we are. Instead of focusing on all the things wrong with us, self-celebration enables us to derive deep satisfaction from being uniquely us. Practice self-celebration by enjoying your awkward laugh or poking fun at your inability to remember people’s names. Or you can do as I do, and smile big for pictures to show off your buck tooth.
While celebrating your quirks, don’t forget to keep growing. Keep your eyes and ears open to the people you trust. Listen when they tell you that you have work to do on yourself. It doesn’t make you bad, just human. People you care about will be the ones that help you distinguish between flaws that need acceptance and flaws that need fixing. (Remember, you want others to get their needs met, too.) This part is crucial, and it keeps us from sliding out of self-love and into complacency.
In sum, feeling positively about ourselves takes effort. But by changing our views, we can change our lives.confidence, self-compassion, self-esteem, well-being, Features, Mind & Body, Happiness2016-10-19T10:29:00+00:00Changing Diapers as Foreplayhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/changing_diapers_as_foreplay
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/changing_diapers_as_foreplay#When:11:28:00ZA common complaint of couples that come to my office for counseling after becoming parents is a lackluster sex life, typically a decline in the frequency and quality of their lovemaking.

Becoming a parent has many joys, but a great sex life is often not one of them.

From balancing work schedules with carpools and after-school activities, to the evening hustle of getting dinner on the table and the kids to bed, many parents have little time or energy left for intimacy. Relationships are also strained by other factors, such as the added financial pressures that come with having kids, and disagreements about parenting styles. So couples expect me to ask them about things like desire, conflict, and communication.

Which I do, but I’ve recently taken to asking about something else first, a question that often takes them by surprise: Who does the diapers?

This may seem like a trivial detail of family life, but recent research shows that heterosexual parents who split childcare duties evenly have the best sex lives, as measured by both frequency and quality of sex. These couples also have the most satisfying relationships in general, results that mirror another study showing that couples who split household chores report better relationships.

Researchers studied data on almost 500 couples, dividing them into three groups: those in which the mother did most of the childcare (60 percent or more), those in which the father did most of the childcare, and those in which both partners split the childcare duties. (One limitation of this study is that it did not also include data on same-sex couples.)

These three groups were compared with each other in terms of frequency of sex, quality of sex, and overall relationship quality. Couples who shared childcare responsibilities reported the best sex lives and the most satisfying relationships.

Notably, the couples that reported the lowest-quality sex life and relationship were the ones in which the mother did the lion’s share of childcare tasks.

According to one of the study’s authors, “One of the most important findings is that the only childcare arrangement that appears really problematic for the quality of both a couple’s relationship and sex life is when the woman does most or all of the childcare.”

This research does not tell us why couples that share childcare duties have better sex lives, but as a psychologist who works extensively with couples and parents, my clinical experience suggests that a primary reason is this: Good sex in a committed relationship is facilitated by emotional intimacy. Emotional intimacy can’t happen when one partner feels that his or her needs are taking a back seat more often than not.

For example, if Dad typically comes home from work and plops down on the couch while Mom makes dinner and corrals the kids—after her own day of full-time work at the office or at home with the kids—this pattern over time is likely to create resentment and emotional distance.

Emotional distance is a sex-killer in a relationship.

Yes, Dad is tired and needs a break, and so does Mom. Taking care of children can be tedious and exhausting; there’s no way around that.

However, when one person in a relationship is regularly not pitching in on the shared project of child-rearing, that lack of participation can erode the critical sense of “we’re in this together” that underpins a satisfying relationship.

In contrast, when both parents treat raising kids as a shared project with shared responsibilities, they are more likely to see their relationship as a true partnership with give and take. This, in turn, supports emotional intimacy, and emotional intimacy supports good sex.

Couples whose sex life has suffered since becoming parents can begin by looking at how they share the work of parenting.

Talk candidly about the situation and strive to find ways to create more balance in your childcare responsibilities. This can be difficult, especially for couples who have become entrenched in a routine, even if that routine is not working well for both individuals; for example, Dad habitually watches TV or works while Mom cooks or cleans up. (I realize that example sounds like a stereotype, but research shows it statistically reflects the current reality of gender roles).

If you are the one in the relationship that is regularly doing the majority of childcare, resist the temptation to point the finger at your partner. While your partner is also responsible for the current state of affairs, it is equally important to ask yourself what role you may play in contributing to the current situation.

For example, one mother that I worked with realized that she did most of the childcare because she didn’t like how her husband did things: “If I let him give the kids a bath, he always forgets something, like washing their hair or under their nails. If he’s in charge of getting them dressed in the morning, nothing matches and the kids look like ragamuffins.”

If this woman’s perspective sounds familiar, ask yourself whether you can be more flexible in your standards. Is maintaining them worth the trade-off in time, aggravation, and relationship strain, or is there room for compromise? There is no right answer here, just the recognition that we ourselves play a role in what happens in our relationships.

Changing diapers might seem like a chore that has nothing to do with sex or intimacy, but what it represents—partnership, caring, collaboration—are the cornerstones of a strong and satisfying relationship.

]]>A common complaint of couples that come to my office for counseling after becoming parents is a lackluster sex life, typically a decline in the frequency and quality of their lovemaking.
Becoming a parent has many joys, but a great sex life is often not one of them.
From balancing work schedules with carpools and after-school activities, to the evening hustle of getting dinner on the table and the kids to bed, many parents have little time or energy left for intimacy. Relationships are also strained by other factors, such as the added financial pressures that come with having kids, and disagreements about parenting styles. So couples expect me to ask them about things like desire, conflict, and communication.
Which I do, but I’ve recently taken to asking about something else first, a question that often takes them by surprise: Who does the diapers?
This may seem like a trivial detail of family life, but recent research shows that heterosexual parents who split childcare duties evenly have the best sex lives, as measured by both frequency and quality of sex. These couples also have the most satisfying relationships in general, results that mirror another study showing that couples who split household chores report better relationships.
Researchers studied data on almost 500 couples, dividing them into three groups: those in which the mother did most of the childcare (60 percent or more), those in which the father did most of the childcare, and those in which both partners split the childcare duties. (One limitation of this study is that it did not also include data on same-sex couples.)
These three groups were compared with each other in terms of frequency of sex, quality of sex, and overall relationship quality. Couples who shared childcare responsibilities reported the best sex lives and the most satisfying relationships.
Notably, the couples that reported the lowest-quality sex life and relationship were the ones in which the mother did the lion’s share of childcare tasks.&nbsp;
According to one of the study’s authors, “One of the most important findings is that the only childcare arrangement that appears really problematic for the quality of both a couple’s relationship and sex life is when the woman does most or all of the childcare.”
This research does not tell us why couples that share childcare duties have better sex lives, but as a psychologist who works extensively with couples and parents, my clinical experience suggests that a primary reason is this: Good sex in a committed relationship is facilitated by emotional intimacy.&nbsp; Emotional intimacy can’t happen when one partner feels that his or her needs are taking a back seat more often than not.
For example, if Dad typically comes home from work and plops down on the couch while Mom makes dinner and corrals the kids—after her own day of full-time work at the office or at home with the kids—this pattern over time is likely to create resentment and emotional distance.
Emotional distance is a sex-killer in a relationship.
Yes, Dad is tired and needs a break, and so does Mom. Taking care of children can be tedious and exhausting; there’s no way around that.
However, when one person in a relationship is regularly not pitching in on the shared project of child-rearing, that lack of participation can erode the critical sense of “we’re in this together” that underpins a satisfying relationship.
In contrast, when both parents treat raising kids as a shared project with shared responsibilities, they are more likely to see their relationship as a true partnership with give and take. This, in turn, supports emotional intimacy, and emotional intimacy supports good sex.
Couples whose sex life has suffered since becoming parents can begin by looking at how they share the work of parenting.
Talk candidly about the situation and strive to find ways to create more balance in your childcare responsibilities. This can be difficult, especially for couples who have become entrenched in a routine, even if that routine is not working well for both individuals; for example, Dad habitually watches TV or works while Mom cooks or cleans up. (I realize that example sounds like a stereotype, but research shows it statistically reflects the current reality of gender roles).
If you are the one in the relationship that is regularly doing the majority of childcare, resist the temptation to point the finger at your partner. While your partner is also responsible for the current state of affairs, it is equally important to ask yourself what role you may play in contributing to the current situation.
For example, one mother that I worked with realized that she did most of the childcare because she didn’t like how her husband did things: “If I let him give the kids a bath, he always forgets something, like washing their hair or under their nails. If he’s in charge of getting them dressed in the morning, nothing matches and the kids look like ragamuffins.”
If this woman’s perspective sounds familiar, ask yourself whether you can be more flexible in your standards. Is maintaining them worth the trade-off in time, aggravation, and relationship strain, or is there room for compromise? There is no right answer here, just the recognition that we ourselves play a role in what happens in our relationships.
Changing diapers might seem like a chore that has nothing to do with sex or intimacy, but what it represents—partnership, caring, collaboration—are the cornerstones of a strong and satisfying relationship.children, communication, family, love, parenting, relationships, In Brief, Family & Couples, Happiness2016-10-18T11:28:00+00:00How to Awaken Joy in Kidshttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_awaken_joy_in_kids
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_awaken_joy_in_kids#When:10:10:00ZCan joy be cultivated? And, if so, can we teach our kids how to be more joyful in their lives?

In our experience, the answer to both of these questions is yes. But it takes knowing what kinds of practices bring true happiness—and not just momentary pleasure—to your life. Once you’ve mastered that, it’s not too hard to introduce those practices to kids in a way that they can understand and appreciate.

Our new book, Awakening Joy for Kids, is a resource for parents, teachers, and caregivers who want to give their kids the gift of authentic happiness. Filled with practices you can integrate into your day at home or at school, our book is designed to be a guide to helping your children increase their well-being and enable them to meet the stresses of the world with presence, self-compassion, and openness. We offer practices for adults as well as kids, since your own well-being is the best prescription to passing it along to younger people.

Many of our practices are rooted in science. For example, we suggest helping kids to set intentions for happiness because paying attention to the good things that happen in life rather than focusing only on the bad can help rewire their brains for happiness. We teach mindfulness meditation because mindfulness has been shown to decrease stress and increase happiness. And we teach the practice of compassion because caring for others is key to better relationships, health, and emotional well-being.

These practices and the others outlined in our book come from our experiences as meditation practitioners and as teachers of adults and children. The two described below—cultivating gratitude and building resilience in difficult times—are some of the most powerful.

1. Gratitude

Paying attention to what you’re grateful for can switch the channel of your negative thinking and help you appreciate what is here in your life right now. To deepen the effect, though, it’s important to let yourself fully experience gratitude when it’s here and take time to savor the moment, particularly in the body. Even just a few seconds of registering the positive feelings of gratitude when they arise help to strengthen their impacts.

Here are a couple of ways we encourage the practice of gratitude, first in adults, then in kids:

Gratitude meditation for adults

To experience a taste of gratitude, try sitting quietly in a relaxed posture and focusing on your heart center. As you inhale, visualize breathing in kindness; as you exhale, allow negativity to be released. Then reflect on some blessing in your life—any person or thing that you are grateful for. It could be as simple as having eyes to see, food to eat, and air to breathe; or it could be thankfulness for having love in your life or a good job or kind friends. Whatever it is, take time to say a quiet “thank you” and then to mindfully experience the good feelings in your body.

Other gratitude practices we’ve found helpful are writing a gratitude letter, listing three good things in a journal before going to bed at night, or just sharing your appreciation for others when you encounter them in your everyday life. Whenever you do a gratitude practice, you deepen your feelings of joy and increase the joy around you. Here’s the key: Don’t miss it!

Gratitude exercises for children

To help instill gratitude in your own children, try starting a gratitude practice at the dinner hour. Perhaps you can hold hands with your children and all share something that you were grateful for that day. It can be something as simple as noticing a flower or the kindness of a friend. Just sharing in this way helps parents and their kids to get a better idea of what’s happening in each other’s lives and is a simple way to build deeper family bonds.

At school, a practice we suggest is to have children gather in a circle and pass around a special stone, sharing what they are grateful for. With a little encouragement, children will come up with many ideas, like “having Mom make my lunch” or “snuggling with my cat” or “living on such a beautiful planet.”

Teachers can encourage kids to write in a special journal about what they are grateful for or to make “gratitude flags”—small pieces of fabric where they write down what they are grateful for—and then hang them from a string in the schoolyard. That way, kids can remember and show their friends what they are thankful for whenever they are outside playing.

2. Help in difficult times

Gratitude and other skills we write about—like intention, mindfulness, and compassion—can be cultivated over time through attention and practice, and they all lead to greater happiness and social-emotional well-being.

But that doesn’t mean that life is always joyful—nor should it be. One of the great truths is that life also brings challenges. It’s important for us to breed joy in our lives not to avoid the inevitable difficulties, but to meet them with strength and compassion.

The practice of embracing the difficult is a vital part of awakening joy. The more we understand suffering and are willing to come to terms with it, the greater the possibility of developing a mind that is not afraid of the hard stuff when it comes—because underneath the pain lies wisdom, compassion, and love that can open to it.

RAIN: How adults can work with difficult feelings

When we suffer, we often experience pain, anger, fear, or sadness. The acronym RAIN can help us remember how to directly open to and work skillfully with these difficult feelings. Here are the steps to doing this practice:

Recognize what you’re feeling. Let yourself be open to your emotions of sadness, anger, or fear, and name it.

Allow it to be here. Let go of any agenda for it to change and, for a few moments, give it permission to be just as it is.

Investigate how it feels in your body on an energetic level without getting into the story behind it or trying to get rid of it. Bring a curiosity or interest that involves simply exploring the landscape of your emotion without needing to figure it out.

Non-identification—meaning, don’t take it personally; don’t assume the experience reflects who you are at your core. (For example, don’t say to yourself, “I’m an angry person.”) Recognize that everyone experiences emotions; they are part of the human condition. Open up to that truth and don’t let it define you.

If exploring difficult emotions becomes too hard, you can always practice a little mindful breathing or gratitude, and go back to exploring the emotions later. This will help you to be kind to yourself, while bringing more balance to your emotions.

Self-compassion for adults

When working with a difficult experience, the most important thing you can do is to be compassionate and caring toward yourself—to not beat yourself up about it and invoke more pain. Practicing self-compassion involves turning your caring attention toward yourself, remembering that your pain is something everyone experiences.

Helping children navigate difficult times

Many parents want to “be there” for their kids, to support their growth and well-being. But being there for them all the time, and not allowing them to experience difficulties and frustrations, can keep them from learning resiliency or the power of handling their emotions with wisdom and compassion. Over-protected children are often more anxious than their peers and have trouble bouncing back from setbacks.

To help children navigate difficult times, we still need to encourage joy practices with our kids. Practicing gratitude and mindfulness during the good times gives them the energy to really put in a concentrated effort when things are difficult—sort of like charging a battery.

But that doesn’t mean we ignore our sadness, anger, fear, or pain. We want to teach children to express their emotions in healthy ways rather than stuffing them down or exploding.

Reframing kids’ thoughts

One thing teachers can do in the classroom is to help children find antidotes to negative thinking—often a big source of stress for kids as well as adults. Children get a lot of negative messaging, and they need ways to counteract that so that it doesn’t lead them down a spiral of despair or helplessness. Reframing or correcting distorted thinking is one way to change negative thinking into realistic thinking.

One exercise involves giving children a sheet of paper that has been divided in two. On one side, the children write down one or more of their own negative thoughts—the kind that tends to run around in their heads, like “I’m not good at math” or “No one likes me.” On the other side, they write down the opposite or the antidote to those negative thoughts, like “I find math challenging, but I’m taking on that challenge and it’s OK if I don’t get every answer right; I’m learning,” or “Just because one person was mean to me doesn’t mean I’m not likable; I can keep being open and kind to others, because that helps me connect and be a good friend.”

Then teachers can ask their students to notice throughout the next day or week when the more positive antidotes run through their minds and encourage them to focus on these when a negative thought arises. By doing this, you are helping to rewire their brains to pay attention to the positive and make it their natural, default setting. This helps kids to be courageous when things get tough, and to not get bogged down in self-defeating thoughts.

Encourage compassion in kids

Another thing that helps is fostering compassionate action. When we learn how to help others who are going through hard times, it can help us to strengthen our relationships, an important resource in challenging situations.

Try this: Ask children to think of someone—a person or an animal or even “the earth”—who is having a hard time. It can be someone they are familiar with or whom they don’t know well.

Then ask them to think of an action they could take to make things better. It’s important to encourage kids to take baby steps and not expect them to solve the whole problem. But they can do small things like write a get-well letter to a sick relative, make a quick phone call to a friend who fell down at school, give a hug to a pet that’s been home alone all day, or water the thirsty plants outside. Encouraging kids to notice others going through challenging times and to take positive steps helps them to stay attuned to the world around them. And it feels great!

We believe that sharing mindfulness and social-emotional practices are vital not only to the next generation but to the well-being of our planet. Whenever we teach our children—and ourselves—to shine a light on the good and to rest our minds on uplifting moments, we are strengthening the ability to empathize with others, feel more connected, build resilience, and be inspired to make this a better world. And that makes for a more joyful life for all!

]]>Can joy be cultivated? And, if so, can we teach our kids how to be more joyful in their lives?
In our experience, the answer to both of these questions is yes. But it takes knowing what kinds of practices bring true happiness—and not just momentary pleasure—to your life. Once you’ve mastered that, it’s not too hard to introduce those practices to kids in a way that they can understand and appreciate.
Our new book, Awakening Joy for Kids, is a resource for parents, teachers, and caregivers who want to give their kids the gift of authentic happiness. Filled with practices you can integrate into your day at home or at school, our book is designed to be a guide to helping your children increase their well-being and enable them to meet the stresses of the world with presence, self-compassion, and openness. We offer practices for adults as well as kids, since your own well-being is the best prescription to passing it along to younger people.
Many of our practices are rooted in science. For example, we suggest helping kids to set intentions for happiness because paying attention to the good things that happen in life rather than focusing only on the bad can help rewire their brains for happiness. We teach mindfulness meditation because mindfulness has been shown to decrease stress and increase happiness. And we teach the practice of compassion because caring for others is key to better relationships, health, and emotional well-being.
These practices and the others outlined in our book come from our experiences as meditation practitioners and as teachers of adults and children. The two described below—cultivating gratitude and building resilience in difficult times—are some of the most powerful.
1. Gratitude
Why practice gratitude? Because gratitude has been found to increase happiness and social support in kids, both crucial for long-term well-being. It also seems to benefit adults.
Paying attention to what you’re grateful for can switch the channel of your negative thinking and help you appreciate what is here in your life right now. To deepen the effect, though, it’s important to let yourself fully experience gratitude when it’s here and take time to savor the moment, particularly in the body. Even just a few seconds of registering the positive feelings of gratitude when they arise help to strengthen their impacts.
Here are a couple of ways we encourage the practice of gratitude, first in adults, then in kids:
Gratitude meditation for adults
To experience a taste of gratitude, try sitting quietly in a relaxed posture and focusing on your heart center. As you inhale, visualize breathing in kindness; as you exhale, allow negativity to be released. Then reflect on some blessing in your life—any person or thing that you are grateful for. It could be as simple as having eyes to see, food to eat, and air to breathe; or it could be thankfulness for having love in your life or a good job or kind friends. Whatever it is, take time to say a quiet “thank you” and then to mindfully experience the good feelings in your body.
Other gratitude practices we’ve found helpful are writing a gratitude letter, listing three good things in a journal before going to bed at night, or just sharing your appreciation for others when you encounter them in your everyday life. Whenever you do a gratitude practice, you deepen your feelings of joy and increase the joy around you. Here’s the key: Don’t miss it!
Gratitude exercises for children
To help instill gratitude in your own children, try starting a gratitude practice at the dinner hour. Perhaps you can hold hands with your children and all share something that you were grateful for that day. It can be something as simple as noticing a flower or the kindness of a friend. Just sharing in this way helps parents and their kids to get a better idea of what’s happening in each other’s lives and is a simple way to build deeper family bonds.
At school, a practice we suggest is to have children gather in a circle and pass around a special stone, sharing what they are grateful for. With a little encouragement, children will come up with many ideas, like “having Mom make my lunch” or “snuggling with my cat” or “living on such a beautiful planet.”
Teachers can encourage kids to write in a special journal about what they are grateful for or to make “gratitude flags”—small pieces of fabric where they write down what they are grateful for—and then hang them from a string in the schoolyard. That way, kids can remember and show their friends what they are thankful for whenever they are outside playing.
2. Help in difficult times
Gratitude and other skills we write about—like intention, mindfulness, and compassion—can be cultivated over time through attention and practice, and they all lead to greater happiness and social-emotional well-being.
But that doesn’t mean that life is always joyful—nor should it be. One of the great truths is that life also brings challenges. It’s important for us to breed joy in our lives not to avoid the inevitable difficulties, but to meet them with strength and compassion.
The practice of embracing the difficult is a vital part of awakening joy. The more we understand suffering and are willing to come to terms with it, the greater the possibility of developing a mind that is not afraid of the hard stuff when it comes—because underneath the pain lies wisdom, compassion, and love that can open to it.
RAIN: How adults can work with difficult feelings
When we suffer, we often experience pain, anger, fear, or sadness. The acronym RAIN can help us remember how to directly open to and work skillfully with these difficult feelings. Here are the steps to doing this practice:
Recognize what you’re feeling. Let yourself be open to your emotions of sadness, anger, or fear, and name it.
Allow it to be here. Let go of any agenda for it to change and, for a few moments, give it permission to be just as it is.
Investigate how it feels in your body on an energetic level without getting into the story behind it or trying to get rid of it. Bring a curiosity or interest that involves simply exploring the landscape of your emotion without needing to figure it out.
Non-identification—meaning, don’t take it personally; don’t assume the experience reflects who you are at your core. (For example, don’t say to yourself, “I’m an angry person.”) Recognize that everyone experiences emotions; they are part of the human condition. Open up to that truth and don’t let it define you.
If exploring difficult emotions becomes too hard, you can always practice a little mindful breathing or gratitude, and go back to exploring the emotions later. This will help you to be kind to yourself, while bringing more balance to your emotions.
Self-compassion for adults
When working with a difficult experience, the most important thing you can do is to be compassionate and caring toward yourself—to not beat yourself up about it and invoke more pain. Practicing self-compassion involves turning your caring attention toward yourself, remembering that your pain is something everyone experiences.
Researcher Kristin Neff suggests placing your hand on your heart and sending yourself positive messages, like “Suffering is a part of life” and “May I hold my suffering with kindness and compassion.” She has found that mindful self-compassion practices have the potential to increase calmness, decrease emotional reactivity toward others, and help us take setbacks less personally—all useful in difficult situations.
Helping children navigate difficult times
Many parents want to “be there” for their kids, to support their growth and well-being. But being there for them all the time, and not allowing them to experience difficulties and frustrations, can keep them from learning resiliency or the power of handling their emotions with wisdom and compassion. Over-protected children are often more anxious than their peers and have trouble bouncing back from setbacks.
To help children navigate difficult times, we still need to encourage joy practices with our kids. Practicing gratitude and mindfulness during the good times gives them the energy to really put in a concentrated effort when things are difficult—sort of like charging a battery.
But that doesn’t mean we ignore our sadness, anger, fear, or pain. We want to teach children to express their emotions in healthy ways rather than stuffing them down or exploding.
Reframing kids’ thoughts
One thing teachers can do in the classroom is to help children find antidotes to negative thinking—often a big source of stress for kids as well as adults. Children get a lot of negative messaging, and they need ways to counteract that so that it doesn’t lead them down a spiral of despair or helplessness. Reframing or correcting distorted thinking is one way to change negative thinking into realistic thinking.
One exercise involves giving children a sheet of paper that has been divided in two. On one side, the children write down one or more of their own negative thoughts—the kind that tends to run around in their heads, like “I’m not good at math” or “No one likes me.” On the other side, they write down the opposite or the antidote to those negative thoughts, like “I find math challenging, but I’m taking on that challenge and it’s OK if I don’t get every answer right; I’m learning,” or “Just because one person was mean to me doesn’t mean I’m not likable; I can keep being open and kind to others, because that helps me connect and be a good friend.”
Then teachers can ask their students to notice throughout the next day or week when the more positive antidotes run through their minds and encourage them to focus on these when a negative thought arises. By doing this, you are helping to rewire their brains to pay attention to the positive and make it their natural, default setting. This helps kids to be courageous when things get tough, and to not get bogged down in self-defeating thoughts.
Encourage compassion in kids
Another thing that helps is fostering compassionate action. When we learn how to help others who are going through hard times, it can help us to strengthen our relationships, an important resource in challenging situations.
Try this: Ask children to think of someone—a person or an animal or even “the earth”—who is having a hard time. It can be someone they are familiar with or whom they don’t know well.
Then ask them to think of an action they could take to make things better. It’s important to encourage kids to take baby steps and not expect them to solve the whole problem. But they can do small things like write a get-well letter to a sick relative, make a quick phone call to a friend who fell down at school, give a hug to a pet that’s been home alone all day, or water the thirsty plants outside. Encouraging kids to notice others going through challenging times and to take positive steps helps them to stay attuned to the world around them. And it feels great!
We believe that sharing mindfulness and social-emotional practices are vital not only to the next generation but to the well-being of our planet. Whenever we teach our children—and ourselves—to shine a light on the good and to rest our minds on uplifting moments, we are strengthening the ability to empathize with others, feel more connected, build resilience, and be inspired to make this a better world. And that makes for a more joyful life for all!children, education, gratitude, happiness, parenting, resilience, Book Reviews, Education, Family & Couples, Gratitude, Compassion, Happiness2016-10-10T10:10:00+00:00How to Teach Happiness at Schoolhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_teach_happiness_at_school
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_teach_happiness_at_school#When:11:15:00ZHealth is part of every public-school education. But what is health? It’s more than just nutrition and gym class.

As early as 1947, the World Health Organization defined health as a state of mental and social—not just physical—well-being. Today, more and more schools worldwide are integrating social-emotional learning into their curriculum, teaching skills such as self-awareness, empathy, and active listening.

A few years ago, working with my colleague Lucy Ryan, we developed a comprehensive Well-Being Curriculum that is now being implemented in many elementary schools and high schools in the UK, France, Japan, and Australia. The Well-Being Curriculum is based on the principles and findings of positive psychology, and can be used with students from about 9-14 years of age. Every other week, for 50 minutes, students learn about the major factors that seem to influence well-being, and they try out happiness-enhancing practices and activities.

A recent study of the program showed that it protected students against the decline in satisfaction with self, satisfaction with friends, and positive emotions—and the increase in negative emotions—that typically occurs in the first years of middle school. Other studies have shown that the schools teaching happiness skills academically outperform the schools teaching a standard health curriculum.

In other words, focusing on well-being can even contribute to the core mission of education. Here are my suggestions for teachers who want to share these lessons with their students.

We also talk about the importance of relationships, one of the best predictors of happiness. It is well known that strong social ties are at the very core of our well-being, regardless of whether we are introverts or extraverts. Many of the valued strengths, such as kindness and forgiveness, are of an interpersonal nature. Close friendships (not the mere number, but rather their quality) have far greater influence on our happiness than an increase in income.

This part of the program focuses on the basic relationships skills, such as being able to form and maintain friendships, negotiate, listen, and, even more importantly, hear. Forgiveness, kindness, and gratitude are also included, as the main relationship strengths. The stream finishes with happiness across cultures, a lesson that highlights factors that allow countries to flourish, taking the scope of relationships to the planetary level.

How to get started

Teachers often feel pressure to concentrate on forthcoming tests and exams, and spend significant amounts of time on “firefighting”—i.e., dealing with discipline and conflicts. These constraints often mean that it might be difficult, if not impossible, to schedule a well-being class every week.

In this situation, we advise teachers to use the Personal Well-Being Lessons (as well as many other available educational volumes) as piecemeal resources, picking up interventions and activities that can be run one at a time.

Here are a few examples of short activities that you could incorporate into a day’s lesson:

Create a What Went Well wall (a whiteboard with colorful markers would do just fine) and ask all students to write three things that went well for them during the lesson, school day, or school week.

Run the “Can you hear me?” exercise. Ask the class to form pairs. Instruct student A to talk to Student B for one minute about a topic that excites them, such as a holiday, a hobby, or an adventure. B is instructed to deliberately not listen, appearing uninterested and distracted, though they should not leave their seat or walk away. The teacher stops the exercise as soon as 60 seconds is up. In round two, A is instructed to continue talking for a further minute (again about a topic that excites them), and this time, B should listen, acting genuinely interested without going completely over the top. Students are asked to tell the teacher the emotional effect it had on them when they were being ignored vs. when they were being listened to, and the teacher confirms with students how important it is for us to be listened to.

Play “Go fish” with cards from the Happiness Box that also encourage your class to participate in evidence-based positive psychology exercises.

As you begin teaching well-being, don’t be surprised if some of your fellow teachers are a bit skeptical. When we brought the Well-Being Curriculum to two schools in London, one teacher talked about facing resistance from other staff. “They think it’s just loads of clap-trap” because, she said, “it’s not real work, you are not writing stuff down, you are not being tested every week…and there is no nice little certificate that you can have at the end of five years.”

Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Given their importance for the future mental health of our nations, happiness and well-being skills deserve to be taken seriously—and teachers can lead the charge, one classroom at a time.

]]>Health is part of every public-school education. But what is health? It’s more than just nutrition and gym class.
As early as 1947, the World Health Organization defined health as a state of mental and social—not just physical—well-being. Today, more and more schools worldwide are integrating social-emotional learning into their curriculum, teaching skills such as self-awareness, empathy, and active listening.
Research demonstrates that happy people are successful across multiple life domains, including marriage, relationships, health, longevity, income, and academic and work performance. They are better able to multitask and endure boring tasks, and are more creative, trusting, helpful and sociable.&nbsp;
So how do we teach the skills of well-being to students?
A few years ago, working with my colleague Lucy Ryan, we developed a comprehensive Well-Being Curriculum that is now being implemented in many elementary schools and high schools in the UK, France, Japan, and Australia. The Well-Being Curriculum is based on the principles and findings of positive psychology, and can be used with students from about 9-14 years of age. Every other week, for 50 minutes, students learn about the major factors that seem to influence well-being, and they try out happiness-enhancing practices and activities.
A recent study of the program showed that it protected students against the decline in satisfaction with self, satisfaction with friends, and positive emotions—and the increase in negative emotions—that typically occurs in the first years of middle school. Other studies have shown that the schools teaching happiness skills academically outperform the schools teaching a standard health curriculum.
In other words, focusing on well-being can even contribute to the core mission of education. Here are my suggestions for teachers who want to share these lessons with their students.
Teaching positive emotions
The “broaden-and-build” theory of positive emotions, developed by Barbara Fredrickson, shows that positive emotional experiences have long-lasting effects on our personal growth and development. Specifically, positive emotions broaden our attention and thinking, enhance resilience, and build durable personal resources, which fuel more positive emotions in the future.
During this part of the program, we teach the important adaptive functions of both positive and negative emotions, ways to cope with our tendency to focus on the bad things in life, and how to enhance positive emotions through savoring and reminiscence.
We also talk about the importance of relationships, one of the best predictors of happiness. It is well known that strong social ties are at the very core of our well-being, regardless of whether we are introverts or extraverts. Many of the valued strengths, such as kindness and forgiveness, are of an interpersonal nature. Close friendships (not the mere number, but rather their quality) have far greater influence on our happiness than an increase in income.
This part of the program focuses on the basic relationships skills, such as being able to form and maintain friendships, negotiate, listen, and, even more importantly, hear. Forgiveness, kindness, and gratitude are also included, as the main relationship strengths. The stream finishes with happiness across cultures, a lesson that highlights factors that allow countries to flourish, taking the scope of relationships to the planetary level.
How to get started
Teachers often feel pressure to concentrate on forthcoming tests and exams, and spend significant amounts of time on “firefighting”—i.e., dealing with discipline and conflicts. These constraints often mean that it might be difficult, if not impossible, to schedule a well-being class every week.
In this situation, we advise teachers to use the Personal Well-Being Lessons (as well as many other available educational volumes) as piecemeal resources, picking up interventions and activities that can be run one at a time.
Here are a few examples of short activities that you could incorporate into a day’s lesson:
Create a What Went Well wall (a whiteboard with colorful markers would do just fine) and ask all students to write three things that went well for them during the lesson, school day, or school week.
Run the “Can you hear me?” exercise. Ask the class to form pairs. Instruct student A to talk to Student B for one minute about a topic that excites them, such as a holiday, a hobby, or an adventure. B is instructed to deliberately not listen, appearing uninterested and distracted, though they should not leave their seat or walk away. The teacher stops the exercise as soon as 60 seconds is up. In round two, A is instructed to continue talking for a further minute (again about a topic that excites them), and this time, B should listen, acting genuinely interested without going completely over the top. Students are asked to tell the teacher the emotional effect it had on them when they were being ignored vs. when they were being listened to, and the teacher confirms with students how important it is for us to be listened to.
Play “Go fish” with cards from the Happiness Box that also encourage your class to participate in evidence-based positive psychology exercises.
As you begin teaching well-being, don’t be surprised if some of your fellow teachers are a bit skeptical. When we brought the Well-Being Curriculum to two schools in London, one teacher talked about facing resistance from other staff. “They think it’s just loads of clap-trap” because, she said, “it’s not real work, you are not writing stuff down, you are not being tested every week…and there is no nice little certificate that you can have at the end of five years.”&nbsp;
Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Given their importance for the future mental health of our nations, happiness and well-being skills deserve to be taken seriously—and teachers can lead the charge, one classroom at a time.education, happiness, health, positive emotions, positive psychology, schools, teachers, Features, Education, Happiness2016-10-06T11:15:00+00:00Six Ways to Get More Happiness for Your Moneyhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_to_get_more_happiness_for_your_money
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_to_get_more_happiness_for_your_money#When:10:29:00ZWhen we think about spending our money wisely, we usually focus on getting the best value for the lowest price. We comparison shop and download apps to find the latest discounts and deals; we’re seduced by the daily special or the limited-time offer.

But, for those of us lucky enough to have disposable income, what if we defined wise spending in terms of the happiness that it brings? That’s a completely different way of thinking about our purchases, and one that we have little practice in.

“Most people don’t know the basic scientific facts about happiness—about what brings it and what sustains it—and so they don’t know how to use their money to acquire it,” write Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues in a 2011 study.

Luckily, more than a decade of research has been investigating how different types of purchases affect our well-being, and it can help us turn spending into a happiness practice in its own right. The key, it seems, is to spend money in ways that bring you closer to other people.

1. Spend money on experiences

In a landmark study in 2003, researchers found that buying experiences—like seeing a Broadway play or going for coffee with a friend—improve our well-being more than buying possessions. Across different surveys, more than 1,500 participants tended to say that experiential purchases made them happier and were better investments, and that their moods were more positive when recalling them.

Thus began more than a decade of research into this phenomenon, unearthing some of the reasons why buying experiences is so beneficial—which can inform our financial choices in the future.

But first, some definitions: Although the distinction between experiences and material goods is sometimes fuzzy (think: books and cars), we tend to intuitively understand which is which. Researchers typically define experiences as things we buy in order to do something, which don’t endure in the form of a possession; and material goods as things we buy in order to have something.

2. Better yet, spend money on experiences you share with others

Not all experiences are created equal, though, and it’s up to us to choose the ones that are most fulfilling. In a 2013 study, when researchers separated out experiential purchases into social ones and solitary ones—going out to dinner with friends or alone, for example—participants reported that the solitary experiences brought just as little happiness as the material things.

“It may be less the doing that creates happiness than it is sharing the doing,” the authors of that study explain.

Even if we can’t share an experience with others initially, we can share it with them later by telling the story—another advantage that experiences have over material things. Our new kitchen gadget or trench coat loses its conversation value shortly after we buy it, but “talking to others allows us to relive experiences long after they have happened. In this sense, experiential purchases are gifts that keep on giving,” write the authors of a 2015 study.

In fact, that study found that the more we chatter about our experiential purchases, the more happiness we derive from them. This’ll make a great story later is actually a real benefit. A 2012 study also found that people are more likely to mention experiences they bought (vs. material things) when recounting their life story.

With a little change in perspective, though, we can extract more happiness from our possessions by focusing on the experiences they facilitate. At least threedifferentstudies found that thinking about gray-area purchases like music and TVs more as experiences than objects helped people see them as more self-expressive and reduce the risk of buyer’s remorse. So the next time you buy a new flatscreen, think of it not as a fancy piece of technology but as a prop for cosy evenings with your spouse, and you might enjoy it all the more.

The story emerging from the research is that experiences become part of our identity, which makes them feel valuable in their own right. Compared to possessions, we worry less about what others will think of our experiences, and they don’t generate the same kind of regret. If anything, we lament the experiences we didn’t buy: the shows we were too busy to attend, the trips we put off. Though experiences may be fleeting, they’re essential to our happiness—so now you’ve got a science-backed excuse to invest in them.

3. Spend money on other people

If you want to bond with other people, you could buy experiences to have with them—or you could spend money on them directly.

In a 2008 study, researchers gave participants up to $20 to spend on themselves or on others that same day, then called after 5 pm to see how they were feeling. In the end, contrary to expectations, participants reported being happier after treating others than treating themselves. The same was true of employees who spent more of their bonuses on donations and gifts, rather than personal expenses and treats.

And this effect may not be restricted to rich, white Westerners. For a 2013 study, researchers gave participants in Canada and South Africa the choice to get $2.50 in cash, take home a $3 goody bag, or give a $3 goody bag to a sick child. Those who made the generous decision reported greater positive emotion at the end of the experiment, in both countries. So did participants in India who simply remembered purchases made for others, compared to remembering purchases for themselves or not recalling anything in particular.

But just because it typically feels good to spend on others doesn’t mean that all generous purchases make us feel warm and fuzzy. Research is starting to understand exactly when so-called “prosocial” spending contributes to well-being, and how to find the most fulfillment in giving.

For example, another 2013 study distinguished between spending on others that strengthens our social connections and spending on others that doesn’t. Researchers gave participants a $10 Starbucks gift card to use that day, in one of four ways: treating themselves to a coffee alone, giving the card to someone else, taking a friend but spending the card on themselves, or taking a friend and treating them. In the end, the happiest participants were the last group: the ones who combined spending on others with social connection (and venti caramel lattes).

4. Spend money on the right people

Does it matter whom we spend money on? Preliminary research suggests that it might. In a 2011 study, participants who recalled spending $20 on someone close to them reported feeling more positive emotion than those who recalled spending $20 on an acquaintance. In the context of evolution, the researchers explain, this makes sense: Early humans who enjoyed helping family members were more likely to see their DNA survive.

The research about spending on others is particularly relevant when we consider donating to charity. For example, it’s important for donors to see the positive impact: When Canadians were given the chance to donate to the charities UNICEF or Spread the Net, bigger donors reported feeling more positive emotion and more satisfaction with life than smaller donors—but only those who gave to Spread the Net, whose pamphlets emphasize that a single bed net can prevent malaria and save a child’s life.

Simon Fraser University assistant professor Lara Aknin, who was involved in both of these studies, applies this research to her own life by treating friends and family to small gifts, and trying to make donations that have a big impact. The upshot of her research is that if giving leaves you feeling detached or drained, there may be smarter ways to allocate your dollars so everyone can benefit.

As you might have noticed, almost all of this research asks people to recall spending from the past, or contemplate imaginary choices. Researchers will gain even greater insight when they start to survey participants in real-time to see how they’re feeling about their purchases, like this 2016 study did, or follow them for years after a purchase to see how those feelings change with time.

5. Express your identity through spending

Although dozens of studies support the notion that spending on experiences and other people is advantageous in general, perhaps you’re skeptical. Sure, that may be true for other people, but not for me, you might think—and in some cases, you just might be right. Once general trends are identified, the researchers of a 2016 study explain, the science of happy spending will have to start accounting for individual needs and preferences.

For example, demographics and personality may influence how spending affects our happiness. Severalstudies found some evidence that the happiness advantage of experiential purchases (over material ones) is even stronger for women than it is for men; in that pioneering 2003 study, it was also stronger for young people, highly educated people, and city dwellers.

In contrast, people who behave more materialistically—tending to accumulate possessions rather than experiences—seem to derive equal happiness from both types of purchases, a 2014 study found. Why? Researchers discovered that experiences are less critical to their identity; these aren’t people who define themselves by the things they’ve done, like the fun-loving adventurers who splurge on plane tickets or the foodies first in line at five-star restaurants.

Meanwhile, and perhaps unsurprisingly, people who have little concern for others don’t seem to derive greater happiness from prosocial rather than selfish spending. Future research will have to investigate whether all these findings are merely blips, or evidence of real and robust differences.

A 2016 study specifically tested whether personality influences the happiness we get from our purchases, analyzing six months’ worth of spending by customers of a UK bank. Purchases were grouped into 59 categories, from gardening to coffee shops, accounting to dentists, which each got a Big Five personality score. (Spending on charities might reflect conscientiousness and agreeableness, for example, while spending on tourism might reflect openness to experience and extraversion.) Participants with a better match between their personality and the personality of their purchases reported more satisfaction with life.

In a follow-up study, the researchers contrasted two stereotypically opposite purchases: shopping in the quiet, reflective haven of a bookstore or the bustling, social environment of a bar. They found that spending $10 at a bookstore increased the happiness of introverts, and spending at a bar increased the happiness of extroverts—but not vice versa.

“Money enables us to lead a life we want,” says coauthor Sandra Matz, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. As she and her coauthors write, “Finding the right products to maintain and enhance one’s preferred lifestyle could turn out to be as important to well-being as finding the right job, the right neighborhood, or even the right friends and partners.”

6. Think less about spending

In the end, though, the best way to cultivate happiness through spending may be to not focus on spending so much in the first place.

In one 2002 study, for example, researchers found that adults were happier around Christmas—feeling more satisfied, more positive, and less stressed by the holiday craziness—when they put greater emphasis on family and religion and less emphasis on giving and receiving. Just this year, a new study found that people who valued time over money tended to be more satisfied with their lives in general and felt more positive and less negative emotions recently.

It’s certainly misguided to stake all our hopes of happiness on our purchases. But so is ignoring the role that they do play in our well-being, a role that is becoming clearer and clearer. Buying is an opportunity to express our personality, to connect with others, and to craft a meaningful life story, and what better definition is there of money well spent?

]]>When we think about spending our money wisely, we usually focus on getting the best value for the lowest price. We comparison shop and download apps to find the latest discounts and deals; we’re seduced by the daily special or the limited-time offer.
But, for those of us lucky enough to have disposable income, what if we defined wise spending in terms of the happiness that it brings? That’s a completely different way of thinking about our purchases, and one that we have little practice in.
“Most people don’t know the basic scientific facts about happiness—about what brings it and what sustains it—and so they don’t know how to use their money to acquire it,” write Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues in a 2011 study.
Luckily, more than a decade of research has been investigating how different types of purchases affect our well-being, and it can help us turn spending into a happiness practice in its own right. The key, it seems, is to spend money in ways that bring you closer to other people.
1. Spend money on experiences
In a landmark study in 2003, researchers found that buying experiences—like seeing a Broadway play or going for coffee with a friend—improve our well-being more than buying possessions. Across different surveys, more than 1,500 participants tended to say that experiential purchases made them happier and were better investments, and that their moods were more positive when recalling them.
Thus began more than a decade of research into this phenomenon, unearthing some of the reasons why buying experiences is so beneficial—which can inform our financial choices in the future.
But first, some definitions: Although the distinction between experiences and material goods is sometimes fuzzy (think: books and cars), we tend to intuitively understand which is which. Researchers typically define experiences as things we buy in order to do something, which don’t endure in the form of a possession; and material goods as things we buy in order to have something.
2. Better yet, spend money on experiences you share with others
Not all experiences are created equal, though, and it’s up to us to choose the ones that are most fulfilling. In a 2013 study, when researchers separated out experiential purchases into social ones and solitary ones—going out to dinner with friends or alone, for example—participants reported that the solitary experiences brought just as little happiness as the material things.
“It may be less the doing that creates happiness than it is sharing the doing,” the authors of that study explain.
Even if we can’t share an experience with others initially, we can share it with them later by telling the story—another advantage that experiences have over material things. Our new kitchen gadget or trench coat loses its conversation value shortly after we buy it, but “talking to others allows us to relive experiences long after they have happened. In this sense, experiential purchases are gifts that keep on giving,” write the authors of a 2015 study.
In fact, that study found that the more we chatter about our experiential purchases, the more happiness we derive from them. This’ll make a great story later is actually a real benefit. A 2012 study also found that people are more likely to mention experiences they bought (vs. material things) when recounting their life story.
With a little change in perspective, though, we can extract more happiness from our possessions by focusing on the experiences they facilitate. At least three different studies found that thinking about gray-area purchases like music and TVs more as experiences than objects helped people see them as more self-expressive and reduce the risk of buyer’s remorse. So the next time you buy a new flatscreen, think of it not as a fancy piece of technology but as a prop for cosy evenings with your spouse, and you might enjoy it all the more.
The story emerging from the research is that experiences become part of our identity, which makes them feel valuable in their own right. Compared to possessions, we worry less about what others will think of our experiences, and they don’t generate the same kind of regret. If anything, we lament the experiences we didn’t buy: the shows we were too busy to attend, the trips we put off. Though experiences may be fleeting, they’re essential to our happiness—so now you’ve got a science-backed excuse to invest in them.
3. Spend money on other people
If you want to bond with other people, you could buy experiences to have with them—or you could spend money on them directly.
In a 2008 study, researchers gave participants up to $20 to spend on themselves or on others that same day, then called after 5 pm to see how they were feeling. In the end, contrary to expectations, participants reported being happier after treating others than treating themselves. The same was true of employees who spent more of their bonuses on donations and gifts, rather than personal expenses and treats.
And this effect may not be restricted to rich, white Westerners. For a 2013 study, researchers gave participants in Canada and South Africa the choice to get $2.50 in cash, take home a $3 goody bag, or give a $3 goody bag to a sick child. Those who made the generous decision reported greater positive emotion at the end of the experiment, in both countries. So did participants in India who simply remembered purchases made for others, compared to remembering purchases for themselves or not recalling anything in particular.
But just because it typically feels good to spend on others doesn’t mean that all generous purchases make us feel warm and fuzzy. Research is starting to understand exactly when so-called “prosocial” spending contributes to well-being, and how to find the most fulfillment in giving.
For example, another 2013 study distinguished between spending on others that strengthens our social connections and spending on others that doesn’t. Researchers gave participants a $10 Starbucks gift card to use that day, in one of four ways: treating themselves to a coffee alone, giving the card to someone else, taking a friend but spending the card on themselves, or taking a friend and treating them. In the end, the happiest participants were the last group: the ones who combined spending on others with social connection (and venti caramel lattes).
4. Spend money on the right people
Does it matter whom we spend money on? Preliminary research suggests that it might. In a 2011 study, participants who recalled spending $20 on someone close to them reported feeling more positive emotion than those who recalled spending $20 on an acquaintance. In the context of evolution, the researchers explain, this makes sense: Early humans who enjoyed helping family members were more likely to see their DNA survive.
The research about spending on others is particularly relevant when we consider donating to charity. For example, it’s important for donors to see the positive impact: When Canadians were given the chance to donate to the charities UNICEF or Spread the Net, bigger donors reported feeling more positive emotion and more satisfaction with life than smaller donors—but only those who gave to Spread the Net, whose pamphlets emphasize that a single bed net can prevent malaria and save a child’s life.
Simon Fraser University assistant professor Lara Aknin, who was involved in both of these studies, applies this research to her own life by treating friends and family to small gifts, and trying to make donations that have a big impact. The upshot of her research is that if giving leaves you feeling detached or drained, there may be smarter ways to allocate your dollars so everyone can benefit.
As you might have noticed, almost all of this research asks people to recall spending from the past, or contemplate imaginary choices. Researchers will gain even greater insight when they start to survey participants in real-time to see how they’re feeling about their purchases, like this 2016 study did, or follow them for years after a purchase to see how those feelings change with time.
5. Express your identity through spending
Although dozens of studies support the notion that spending on experiences and other people is advantageous in general, perhaps you’re skeptical. Sure, that may be true for other people, but not for me, you might think—and in some cases, you just might be right. Once general trends are identified, the researchers of a 2016 study explain, the science of happy spending will have to start accounting for individual needs and preferences.
For example, demographics and personality may influence how spending affects our happiness. Several studies found some evidence that the happiness advantage of experiential purchases (over material ones) is even stronger for women than it is for men; in that pioneering 2003 study, it was also stronger for young people, highly educated people, and city dwellers.
In contrast, people who behave more materialistically—tending to accumulate possessions rather than experiences—seem to derive equal happiness from both types of purchases, a 2014 study found. Why? Researchers discovered that experiences are less critical to their identity; these aren’t people who define themselves by the things they’ve done, like the fun-loving adventurers who splurge on plane tickets or the foodies first in line at five-star restaurants.
Meanwhile, and perhaps unsurprisingly, people who have little concern for others don’t seem to derive greater happiness from prosocial rather than selfish spending. Future research will have to investigate whether all these findings are merely blips, or evidence of real and robust differences.&nbsp;
A 2016 study specifically tested whether personality influences the happiness we get from our purchases, analyzing six months’ worth of spending by customers of a UK bank. Purchases were grouped into 59 categories, from gardening to coffee shops, accounting to dentists, which each got a Big Five personality score. (Spending on charities might reflect conscientiousness and agreeableness, for example, while spending on tourism might reflect openness to experience and extraversion.) Participants with a better match between their personality and the personality of their purchases reported more satisfaction with life.
In a follow-up study, the researchers contrasted two stereotypically opposite purchases: shopping in the quiet, reflective haven of a bookstore or the bustling, social environment of a bar. They found that spending $10 at a bookstore increased the happiness of introverts, and spending at a bar increased the happiness of extroverts—but not vice versa.
“Money enables us to lead a life we want,” says coauthor Sandra Matz, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. As she and her coauthors write, “Finding the right products to maintain and enhance one’s preferred lifestyle could turn out to be as important to well-being as finding the right job, the right neighborhood, or even the right friends and partners.”
6. Think less about spending
In the end, though, the best way to cultivate happiness through spending may be to not focus on spending so much in the first place.
In one 2002 study, for example, researchers found that adults were happier around Christmas—feeling more satisfied, more positive, and less stressed by the holiday craziness—when they put greater emphasis on family and religion and less emphasis on giving and receiving. Just this year, a new study found that people who valued time over money tended to be more satisfied with their lives in general and felt more positive and less negative emotions recently.
It’s certainly misguided to stake all our hopes of happiness on our purchases. But so is ignoring the role that they do play in our well-being, a role that is becoming clearer and clearer. Buying is an opportunity to express our personality, to connect with others, and to craft a meaningful life story, and what better definition is there of money well spent?happiness, materialism, money, personality, prosocial behavior, social connections, Features, Big Ideas, Happiness2016-10-04T10:29:00+00:00How Can We Liberate Parents from Guilt?http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_can_we_liberate_parents_from_guilt
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_can_we_liberate_parents_from_guilt#When:11:13:00ZPressure on parents today is endemic, and, for the first time, stress levels among youth have eclipsed those of adults—something parents, too, are frequently blamed for in the media. Pressure on families to parent in a certain way has always existed, but the form the advice takes changes with the prevailing zeitgeist.

These days, “intensive parenting,” “natural parenting,” and “attachment parenting” are generating a lot of attention and controversy. Intensive parenting is just what it sounds like: parent activities that are highly involved yet feel consuming—either because parents lack the support they need to work and raise children, or because parents overreach toward an idealized vision of themselves or their children. Natural parenting is a wide collection of practices that promote “living and parenting responsively and consciously.” And attachment parenting prioritizes the development of an empathic and trusting bond with an infant.

This summer’s new crop of parenting books examines modern pressures and holds them up to the light of science to sort the wheat from the chaff: Which messages are worth paying attention to and which should be discarded? Who is promoting a practice and what do they stand to gain?

American mothers bear the brunt of today’s pressure to be super involved and highly vigilant—with very little social or policy support, say the authors of two new books. And mothers are paying a price.

Pressure to be perfect: The rise of intensive parenting

Intensive parenting, according to anthropologist Solveig Brown, author of All on One Plate: Cultural Expectations on American Mothers, “views children as innocent and priceless, and assumes that mothers will be the primary parent responsible for using child-rearing methods that are child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.”

And American mothers are suffering: Brown reports that a quarter of American women use antidepressants (up 30 percent in the last decade), and twice as many women as men take anti-anxiety medication.

As part of her research, Brown interviewed 140 mostly white, middle-class mothers in the Minneapolis area about their cultural ideas of mothering, how they cope with their “life load,” and how they really parent. Her interviewees described in measured words how they strain to do too much with too little help.

Even though most of the mothers rejected the media-generated picture of the “perfect and self-sacrificing” mother, they said it infiltrated their psyche nonetheless and made them feel pressured, guilty, and judged. They were unaware that other mothers, too, eschewed that perfection—they were sure that they alone fell short.

Brown’s interviewees talked at length about their strain, including salaries that barely offset the high cost of early care, employment conditions designed for the ideal worker who is childless, and an unbalanced division of labor at home.

And that shouldn’t be surprising to hear. Most developed countries support families better than America—which has no comprehensive family policy for paid parental leave or flexible work, daycare, or early childhood education. The cost of a year of high-quality daycare is comparable to a year’s tuition at a public university, and to raise a child in America—not including college tuition—costs about $245,000. The organization Human Rights Watch calls America’s family policy failure “a human rights concern.” Families are left to figure out how to make it all work on their own, and mothers, in particular, carry the burden of closing the gap.

Brown acknowledges that she surveyed an unrepresentative group of middle-class, mostly white Midwesterners. But the good news is that while these mothers were struggling, the majority, in fact, seemed to be raising their families well in large part because they rejected the myth of intensive parenting in their own lives.

Pressure to be home: The rise of natural and attachment parenting

Natural parenting and attachment parenting practices, too, place undue pressures on mothers, and might be deliberately architected with the sexist aim of controlling women’s bodies and keeping them tied to the home, says Amy Tuteur in her provocative polemic, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting.

Tuteur, a former obstetrician gynecologist, current blogger, and longstanding opponent of the natural parenting movement, takes aim in her book at the logic and evidence for natural childbirth, breastfeeding, and attachment parenting. The book is more a polemic than a balanced investigation of a hotly contested area; but for anyone considering these natural parenting practices, it is an eye-opening and worthy read.

Tuteur has several complaints about the movement (whose proponents she compares to creationists and antivaccers): namely, it subverts actual science; it relegates mothers back to the home; it is founded on a few elderly white men’s sexist and religious beliefs about controlling women’s bodies; and it has created lucrative industries and lobbying groups that make the movement unduly influential.

Tuteur takes down each pillar of natural parenting with data and logic. For example, she points out that before modern medicine, natural childbirth was the leading cause of death for both women and babies. With the advent of modern medicine, maternal deaths fell by 99 percent and neonatal deaths by 90 percent, while homebirths have increased neonatal death by three- to nine-fold, or “more than ten times higher than the death rate for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS),” says Tuteur. And many American midwives who attend homebirths are not properly trained or licensed, including Ina May Gaskin, a leading figure in the natural childbirth movement.

Regarding the pressure to breastfeed, Tuteur says the movement makes mothers who have difficulty feel unduly guilty—and the supposed long-term health benefits that motivate women to breastfeed are not definitive. She cites the important 2013 World Health Organization (WHO) study that failed to show long-term differences in adult health due to breastfeeding (except for IQ), but she overstated their conclusion: They actually concluded that health benefits persist into childhood and adolescence, and they advocate for exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life. However, a recent study that used a more sophisticated analysis found that it was not breastfeeding, but socioeconomic conditions, that contributed to differences in health outcomes.

The practice of attachment parenting, Tuteur accurately reports, is a distortion of legitimate research on attachment theory. It promotes practices that are not scientifically linked to secure attachments but that do keep mothers securely attached to their homes. She reveals that attachment parenting proponents William Sears and his wife Martha see their advice as “God’s plan for childrearing.” Unfortunately, Tuteur does not elaborate on the important differences between legitimate attachment theory and the Sears’s attachment parenting practices.

While Push Back may prompt important discussions about birthing, feeding, and early caring among parents-to-be, at times it is too black-and-white, failing to acknowledge that homebirths can be made safer, for example, or that certain close and responsive interactions with adults are a foundation for brain development. And she never answers her critics’ concerns about insensitive medical care or the overreach of the medical establishment.

The big picture

The winds are shifting. Intensive, goal-directed parenting puts parents, and mothers especially, under extraordinary pressure that is not good for them and is not serving children. These new books urge us to raise children in a way that is more closely aligned with how humans actually develop, and with how the world truly is today.

But parents can’t do it alone. Brown asked her interviewees what kinds of help they need, and here’s what the women asked for:

From medical practitioners: Acknowledgement of and treatment for post-partum depression. None of the women Brown interviewed received the care they needed.

From partners: Help with chores. Regardless of their work status, the majority of the women said they do a majority of the housework (which is consistent with other studies).

From friends and extended family: For the support offered to match the support wanted and needed; often there was a mismatch.

From corporations and policymakers: Support protecting children from exploitive industries. Mothers noted that a good part of their time and attention was spent buffering their family from unhealthy influences: sugary foods marketed to children, violent media, and consumerism and materialism.

America must update its policies to support families at least as well as other developed countries do. The most influential developmental scientist of modern times, Urie Bronfenbrenner, said that the degree to which parents can affect their children’s development depends in large part on the more remote forces in their environment—the culture and policies that are the “blueprint” for all the other forces in children’s lives. Only when our culture, policies, and industries become more supportive can we hope to truly relieve parents of unnecessary pressure and guilt.

]]>Pressure on parents today is endemic, and, for the first time, stress levels among youth have eclipsed those of adults—something parents, too, are frequently blamed for in the media. Pressure on families to parent in a certain way has always existed, but the form the advice takes changes with the prevailing zeitgeist.
These days, “intensive parenting,” “natural parenting,” and “attachment parenting” are generating a lot of attention and controversy. Intensive parenting is just what it sounds like: parent activities that are highly involved yet feel consuming—either because parents lack the support they need to work and raise children, or because parents overreach toward an idealized vision of themselves or their children. Natural parenting is a wide collection of practices that promote “living and parenting responsively and consciously.” And attachment parenting prioritizes the development of an empathic and trusting bond with an infant.
This summer’s new crop of parenting books examines modern pressures and holds them up to the light of science to sort the wheat from the chaff: Which messages are worth paying attention to and which should be discarded? Who is promoting a practice and what do they stand to gain?
American mothers bear the brunt of today’s pressure to be super involved and highly vigilant—with very little social or policy support, say the authors of two new books. And mothers are paying a price.
Pressure to be perfect: The rise of intensive parenting
Intensive parenting, according to anthropologist Solveig Brown, author of All on One Plate: Cultural Expectations on American Mothers, “views children as innocent and priceless, and assumes that mothers will be the primary parent responsible for using child-rearing methods that are child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.”
And American mothers are suffering: Brown reports that a quarter of American women use antidepressants (up 30 percent in the last decade), and twice as many women as men take anti-anxiety medication.
As part of her research, Brown interviewed 140 mostly white, middle-class mothers in the Minneapolis area about their cultural ideas of mothering, how they cope with their “life load,” and how they really parent. Her interviewees described in measured words how they strain to do too much with too little help.
Even though most of the mothers rejected the media-generated picture of the “perfect and self-sacrificing” mother, they said it infiltrated their psyche nonetheless and made them feel pressured, guilty, and judged. They were unaware that other mothers, too, eschewed that perfection—they were sure that they alone fell short.
Brown’s interviewees talked at length about their strain, including salaries that barely offset the high cost of early care, employment conditions designed for the ideal worker who is childless, and an unbalanced division of labor at home.
And that shouldn’t be surprising to hear. Most developed countries support families better than America—which has no comprehensive family policy for paid parental leave or flexible work, daycare, or early childhood education. The cost of a year of high-quality daycare is comparable to a year’s tuition at a public university, and to raise a child in America—not including college tuition—costs about $245,000. The organization Human Rights Watch calls America’s family policy failure “a human rights concern.” Families are left to figure out how to make it all work on their own, and mothers, in particular, carry the burden of closing the gap.
Brown acknowledges that she surveyed an unrepresentative group of middle-class, mostly white Midwesterners. But the good news is that while these mothers were struggling, the majority, in fact, seemed to be raising their families well in large part because they rejected the myth of intensive parenting in their own lives.
Pressure to be home: The rise of natural and attachment parenting
Natural parenting and attachment parenting practices, too, place undue pressures on mothers, and might be deliberately architected with the sexist aim of controlling women’s bodies and keeping them tied to the home, says Amy Tuteur in her provocative polemic, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting.
Tuteur, a former obstetrician gynecologist, current blogger, and longstanding opponent of the natural parenting movement, takes aim in her book at the logic and evidence for natural childbirth, breastfeeding, and attachment parenting. The book is more a polemic than a balanced investigation of a hotly contested area; but for anyone considering these natural parenting practices, it is an eye-opening and worthy read.
Tuteur has several complaints about the movement (whose proponents she compares to creationists and antivaccers): namely, it subverts actual science; it relegates mothers back to the home; it is founded on a few elderly white men’s sexist and religious beliefs about controlling women’s bodies; and it has created lucrative industries and lobbying groups that make the movement unduly influential.
Tuteur takes down each pillar of natural parenting with data and logic. For example, she points out that before modern medicine, natural childbirth was the leading cause of death for both women and babies. With the advent of modern medicine, maternal deaths fell by 99 percent and neonatal deaths by 90 percent, while homebirths have increased neonatal death by three- to nine-fold, or “more than ten times higher than the death rate for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS),” says Tuteur. And many American midwives who attend homebirths are not properly trained or licensed, including Ina May Gaskin, a leading figure in the natural childbirth movement.
Regarding the pressure to breastfeed, Tuteur says the movement makes mothers who have difficulty feel unduly guilty—and the supposed long-term health benefits that motivate women to breastfeed are not definitive. She cites the important 2013 World Health Organization (WHO) study that failed to show long-term differences in adult health due to breastfeeding (except for IQ), but she overstated their conclusion: They actually concluded that health benefits persist into childhood and adolescence, and they advocate for exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life. However, a recent study that used a more sophisticated analysis found that it was not breastfeeding, but socioeconomic conditions, that contributed to differences in health outcomes.
The practice of attachment parenting, Tuteur accurately reports, is a distortion of legitimate research on attachment theory. It promotes practices that are not scientifically linked to secure attachments but that do keep mothers securely attached to their homes. She reveals that attachment parenting proponents William Sears and his wife Martha see their advice as “God’s plan for childrearing.” Unfortunately, Tuteur does not elaborate on the important differences between legitimate attachment theory and the Sears’s attachment parenting practices.
While Push Back may prompt important discussions about birthing, feeding, and early caring among parents-to-be, at times it is too black-and-white, failing to acknowledge that homebirths can be made safer, for example, or that certain close and responsive interactions with adults are a foundation for brain development. And she never answers her critics’ concerns about insensitive medical care or the overreach of the medical establishment.
The big picture
The winds are shifting. Intensive, goal-directed parenting puts parents, and mothers especially, under extraordinary pressure that is not good for them and is not serving children. These new books urge us to raise children in a way that is more closely aligned with how humans actually develop, and with how the world truly is today.
But parents can’t do it alone. Brown asked her interviewees what kinds of help they need, and here’s what the women asked for:
From medical practitioners: Acknowledgement of and treatment for post-partum depression. None of the women Brown interviewed received the care they needed.
From partners: Help with chores. Regardless of their work status, the majority of the women said they do a majority of the housework (which is consistent with other studies).
From friends and extended family: For the support offered to match the support wanted and needed; often there was a mismatch.
From corporations and policymakers: Support protecting children from exploitive industries. Mothers noted that a good part of their time and attention was spent buffering their family from unhealthy influences: sugary foods marketed to children, violent media, and consumerism and materialism.
America must update its policies to support families at least as well as other developed countries do. The most influential developmental scientist of modern times, Urie Bronfenbrenner, said that the degree to which parents can affect their children’s development depends in large part on the more remote forces in their environment—the culture and policies that are the “blueprint” for all the other forces in children’s lives. Only when our culture, policies, and industries become more supportive can we hope to truly relieve parents of unnecessary pressure and guilt.children, development, family, parenting, stress, Book Reviews, Family & Couples, Happiness2016-09-30T11:13:00+00:00Why Losing Control Can Make You Happierhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_losing_control_make_you_happier
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_losing_control_make_you_happier#When:09:35:00ZHuman beings have a deep-seated desire for certainty and control.

Several studies show this need serves at least two important purposes. First, it helps us believe that we can shape outcomes and events to our liking. That is, the more in control we feel, the more efficacious we feel about achieving the outcomes we desire, and this sense of competence boosts well-being.

Control also feels good because it makes us believe that we aren’t under someone else’s control. In one study of an old-age home, researchers gave the members of one group control over which plant to grow in their room and which movies to watch. The other group was denied that control. In the eighteen-month period that followed, the death rate of the second group was double that of the first.

That’s why we’re driven to seek control. Indeed, studies show that those with a higher need for control generally set loftier goals and also tend to achieve more. But can it go too far? Can seeking control undermine happiness? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Seeking control is a good thing—but only up to a point. Beyond that point, the drive to control can make you miserable.

Why controlling others creates conflict

Ask yourself this question: how does it feel when you are under someone else’s control? Imagine being married to someone overly controlling. Or worse yet, imagine being someone’s slave. Being controlled is no fun—and that’s why we tend to rebel.

Psychologists call this quality reactance: the desire to do the things that are proscribed. For example, attempting to control your spouse’s diet may be met with increased consumption of unhealthy food—just to spite you. This is why, in adult relationships, you can either have control over others, or you can have their love—not both. And because love is such a fundamental need for us, being overly controlling isn’t good for happiness.

There’s a related reason why being overly controlling of others lowers happiness: it results in what the well-known motivational psychologist David McClelland calls “power stress,” which is the tendency to get angry and frustrated when others don’t behave the way you want them to.

In one study, a group high in need for control and another group low in that need were both asked to deliver an extemporaneous speech to an audience consisting of two confederates. For one set of participants, the confederates reacted in a supportive and pleasant manner, but to the other set, they reacted negatively.

Here’s what the results showed: when the confederates were positive and supportive, both those high and low in need for control felt quite happy. This is not surprising, of course. When the confederates behaved negatively, however, a more interesting result emerged: Those high in need for control found it to be far more disturbing, and ended up feeling significantly more negative, than those low in need for control. This suggests that, when you seek control over others, you set yourself up for anger, frustration, and disappointment when they don’t behave the way you want them to.

In addition to crowding out others’ love and feeling frustrated, there’s yet another reason why the drive to control can lower happiness. This has to do with the quality of decisions we make. It turns out that we make our best decisions when we are exposed to a diverse set of views and inputs. This is why it is important to surround oneself with people from a variety of backgrounds. When we’re overly controlling of others, our decision-making suffers—because we drive away those who disagree with us and thus surround ourselves with only those who don’t mind being controlled: the “yea-sayers.”

Why obsessive passion hurts happiness

Seeking to control others is one way of exercising control. We can also try to control the external environment—the outcomes and events in one’s life. Being overly controlling of outcomes, like being overly controlling of others, also lowers happiness levels for a variety of reasons.

Before I get to these reasons, it’s important to note that being overly controlling of outcomes is not the same as being keen on achieving our goals, like getting into a good school or wanting to be in a great relationship. Findings show that having goals boosts happiness. You cross the line into being overly control-seeking when you become obsessed with achieving the desired outcomes—and the desire to achieve outcomes controls you. Professor Robert Vallerand of the Université du Québec à Montréal describes this tendency as “obsessive passion.”

As most people know, life is uncertain—and trying to overly control outcomes sets you up for disappointment. For example, one study showed that being in an overcrowded room dampened the mood of participants higher in need for control to a greater extent because they felt that the room wasn’t to their liking. Another study found that when people are put in situations in which they have lower control than they desire, their blood pressure shoots up. These findings indicate that when life doesn’t go according to plan—which happens quite regularly of course—those high in need for control suffer more.

And again, the need for control—in this case, of outcomes—hurts decision-making. Findings show that overly controlling people are more likely to take risks and are also likely to become superstitious in stressful situations than those low in need for control. They are also more likely to fall prey to the illusion of control—which is to believe that one has more control over a situation than one actually does—and therefore, are likely to lose more money in gambling contexts involving real stakes.

Finally, the drive to control outcomes lowers happiness because when you want to control something so badly (say, get a particular job), you are likely to sacrifice other things that make you happy. Findings by Vallerand and his colleagues show that being obsessed about something has a negative impact not just on one’s own physical and emotional health, but also on the health of one’s relationships.

Can being out of control make you happier?

Because being overly controlling lowers happiness, it would clearly be useful to figure out ways to, well, control one’s control-seeking tendencies.

One suggestion? Learn to appreciate, rather than avoid, uncertainty.

How can you do that? Recognizing the importance of uncertainty for spicing up life is a good start. We all know, at some level, that uncertainty is important, which is why we avoid reading “spoiler alerts” before going to a movie. And yet, although we instinctively recognize the positive role that uncertainty plays, we also feel threatened by it and believe that it dampens happiness.

Consider this finding: Researchers told participants that they would soon receive a free dollar. One group was asked to imagine that they would learn why they received the dollar soon after getting it, while the other set was asked to imagine that they wouldn’t learn the reason. Both were then asked to indicate how happy they would feel upon receiving the dollar.

The first set—those who expected to know the reason for receiving the free dollar—anticipated feeling happier than the second. In fact, it was the reverse: those who didn’t learn the reason for the free dollar were happier. Summarizing these findings, Todd Kashdan, author of the excellent book Curious?, notes that “what we think brings us pleasure”—in this case certainty and control—“is often the exact opposite of what does.”

Taking control of yourself

If uncertainty is important for happiness, why are we generally averse to it?

Although uncertainty is a good thing for positive events, it isn’t for negative ones. Just as uncertainty can intensify positive feelings when things turn out well, it can intensify negative ones when they turn out badly.

Another reason, I suspect, has to do with how much in control we are of our life. As you may have discovered from personal experience, we can’t appreciate uncertainty if we feel that our life is not in control. It’s only when life is under control—at least with regard to important things like health, relationships, and financial security—that we are capable of appreciating uncertainty.

It follows, therefore, that one way to get yourself to be in a position where you can appreciate uncertainty is to get your life under control first. A big part of this may involve not biting off more than you can chew. In particular, believing that you have enough time on your hands, it turns out, is super important. Most of us lead such fast-paced, frenetic lives that we are constantly under a time crunch. Findings show that the perception of time scarcity is a major happiness killer.

Ironically, the more successful we are in life, the more time scarcity we feel. Findings from a recent study help shed light on why this is the case. Researchers asked participants to play the role of consultants. While one set of students was paid 15 cents per minute for their time, the other half received $1.50. Later, once the project was over, these students were asked how stressed they had felt for time—and it was the higher paid participants who felt more pressure.

This suggests that one way to feel less time scarcity is to deemphasize the amount of money you make at work. Or at least desist from calculating your hourly wage rate. Another, somewhat counterintuitive, approach is to engage in social service; findings show that those who volunteer to help others tend to feel more time abundance. Yet another way of mitigating perceptions of time scarcity is through experiences of awe. Experiments show that exposure to awe-inducing images— whales, waterfalls, and the like—slows down perception of time, leading to feelings that you have more of it.

All of these approaches should, at least in theory, enhance one’s appreciation for uncertainty—and thus help mitigate the desire for control. But of all the ways of mitigating the desire for control, the one that perhaps has the best potential is to take control of yourself. Taking internal control means keeping the keys to your happiness in your own hands. It means never blaming anyone else for one’s unhappiness. It means eating right, exercising, and sleeping better.

We can’t control other people’s feelings and decisions—but we can take responsibility for our own well-being.

]]>Human beings have a deep-seated desire for certainty and control.
Several studies show this need serves at least two important purposes. First, it helps us believe that we can shape outcomes and events to our liking. That is, the more in control we feel, the more efficacious we feel about achieving the outcomes we desire, and this sense of competence boosts well-being.
Control also feels good because it makes us believe that we aren’t under someone else’s control. In one study of an old-age home, researchers gave the members of one group control over which plant to grow in their room and which movies to watch. The other group was denied that control. In the eighteen-month period that followed, the death rate of the second group was double that of the first.
That’s why we’re driven to seek control. Indeed, studies show that those with a higher need for control generally set loftier goals and also tend to achieve more. But can it go too far? Can seeking control undermine happiness? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Seeking control is a good thing—but only up to a point. Beyond that point, the drive to control can make you miserable.
Why controlling others creates conflict
Ask yourself this question: how does it feel when you are under someone else’s control? Imagine being married to someone overly controlling. Or worse yet, imagine being someone’s slave. Being controlled is no fun—and that’s why we tend to rebel.
Psychologists call this quality reactance: the desire to do the things that are proscribed. For example, attempting to control your spouse’s diet may be met with increased consumption of unhealthy food—just to spite you. This is why, in adult relationships, you can either have control over others, or you can have their love—not both. And because love is such a fundamental need for us, being overly controlling isn’t good for happiness.
There’s a related reason why being overly controlling of others lowers happiness: it results in what the well-known motivational psychologist David McClelland calls “power stress,” which is the tendency to get angry and frustrated when others don’t behave the way you want them to.
In one study, a group high in need for control and another group low in that need were both asked to deliver an extemporaneous speech to an audience consisting of two confederates. For one set of participants, the confederates reacted in a supportive and pleasant manner, but to the other set, they reacted negatively.
Here’s what the results showed: when the confederates were positive and supportive, both those high and low in need for control felt quite happy. This is not surprising, of course. When the confederates behaved negatively, however, a more interesting result emerged: Those high in need for control found it to be far more disturbing, and ended up feeling significantly more negative, than those low in need for control. This suggests that, when you seek control over others, you set yourself up for anger, frustration, and disappointment when they don’t behave the way you want them to.
In addition to crowding out others’ love and feeling frustrated, there’s yet another reason why the drive to control can lower happiness. This has to do with the quality of decisions we make. It turns out that we make our best decisions when we are exposed to a diverse set of views and inputs. This is why it is important to surround oneself with people from a variety of backgrounds. When we’re overly controlling of others, our decision-making suffers—because we drive away those who disagree with us and thus surround ourselves with only those who don’t mind being controlled: the “yea-sayers.”
Why obsessive passion hurts happiness
Seeking to control others is one way of exercising control. We can also try to control the external environment—the outcomes and events in one’s life. Being overly controlling of outcomes, like being overly controlling of others, also lowers happiness levels for a variety of reasons.
Before I get to these reasons, it’s important to note that being overly controlling of outcomes is not the same as being keen on achieving our goals, like getting into a good school or wanting to be in a great relationship. Findings show that having goals boosts happiness. You cross the line into being overly control-seeking when you become obsessed with achieving the desired outcomes—and the desire to achieve outcomes controls you. Professor Robert Vallerand of the Université du Québec à Montréal describes this tendency as “obsessive passion.”
As most people know, life is uncertain—and trying to overly control outcomes sets you up for disappointment. For example, one study showed that being in an overcrowded room dampened the mood of participants higher in need for control to a greater extent because they felt that the room wasn’t to their liking. Another study found that when people are put in situations in which they have lower control than they desire, their blood pressure shoots up. These findings indicate that when life doesn’t go according to plan—which happens quite regularly of course—those high in need for control suffer more.
And again, the need for control—in this case, of outcomes—hurts decision-making. Findings show that overly controlling people are more likely to take risks and are also likely to become superstitious in stressful situations than those low in need for control. They are also more likely to fall prey to the illusion of control—which is to believe that one has more control over a situation than one actually does—and therefore, are likely to lose more money in gambling contexts involving real stakes.
Finally, the drive to control outcomes lowers happiness because when you want to control something so badly (say, get a particular job), you are likely to sacrifice other things that make you happy. Findings by Vallerand and his colleagues show that being obsessed about something has a negative impact not just on one’s own physical and emotional health, but also on the health of one’s relationships.
Can being out of control make you happier?
Because being overly controlling lowers happiness, it would clearly be useful to figure out ways to, well, control one’s control-seeking tendencies.
One suggestion? Learn to appreciate, rather than avoid, uncertainty.
How can you do that? Recognizing the importance of uncertainty for spicing up life is a good start. We all know, at some level, that uncertainty is important, which is why we avoid reading “spoiler alerts” before going to a movie. And yet, although we instinctively recognize the positive role that uncertainty plays, we also feel threatened by it and believe that it dampens happiness.
Consider this finding: Researchers told participants that they would soon receive a free dollar. One group was asked to imagine that they would learn why they received the dollar soon after getting it, while the other set was asked to imagine that they wouldn’t learn the reason. Both were then asked to indicate how happy they would feel upon receiving the dollar.
The first set—those who expected to know the reason for receiving the free dollar—anticipated feeling happier than the second. In fact, it was the reverse: those who didn’t learn the reason for the free dollar were happier. Summarizing these findings, Todd Kashdan, author of the excellent book Curious?, notes that “what we think brings us pleasure”—in this case certainty and control—“is often the exact opposite of what does.”
Taking control of yourself
If uncertainty is important for happiness, why are we generally averse to it?
Although uncertainty is a good thing for positive events, it isn’t for negative ones. Just as uncertainty can intensify positive feelings when things turn out well, it can intensify negative ones when they turn out badly.
Another reason, I suspect, has to do with how much in control we are of our life. As you may have discovered from personal experience, we can’t appreciate uncertainty if we feel that our life is not in control. It’s only when life is under control—at least with regard to important things like health, relationships, and financial security—that we are capable of appreciating uncertainty.
It follows, therefore, that one way to get yourself to be in a position where you can appreciate uncertainty is to get your life under control first. A big part of this may involve not biting off more than you can chew. In particular, believing that you have enough time on your hands, it turns out, is super important. Most of us lead such fast-paced, frenetic lives that we are constantly under a time crunch. Findings show that the perception of time scarcity is a major happiness killer.
Ironically, the more successful we are in life, the more time scarcity we feel. Findings from a recent study help shed light on why this is the case. Researchers asked participants to play the role of consultants. While one set of students was paid 15 cents per minute for their time, the other half received $1.50. Later, once the project was over, these students were asked how stressed they had felt for time—and it was the higher paid participants who felt more pressure.
This suggests that one way to feel less time scarcity is to deemphasize the amount of money you make at work. Or at least desist from calculating your hourly wage rate. Another, somewhat counterintuitive, approach is to engage in social service; findings show that those who volunteer to help others tend to feel more time abundance. Yet another way of mitigating perceptions of time scarcity is through experiences of awe. Experiments show that exposure to awe-inducing images— whales, waterfalls, and the like—slows down perception of time, leading to feelings that you have more of it.
All of these approaches should, at least in theory, enhance one’s appreciation for uncertainty—and thus help mitigate the desire for control. But of all the ways of mitigating the desire for control, the one that perhaps has the best potential is to take control of yourself. Taking internal control means keeping the keys to your happiness in your own hands. It means never blaming anyone else for one’s unhappiness. It means eating right, exercising, and sleeping better.
We can’t control other people’s feelings and decisions—but we can take responsibility for our own well-being.
&nbsp;conflict, power, relationships, stress, success, Features, Family & Couples, Work & Career, Mind & Body, Big Ideas, Happiness2016-09-28T09:35:00+00:00How Background Music Influences Our Behavior at Workhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_background_music_influences_our_behavior_at_work
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_background_music_influences_our_behavior_at_work#When:11:45:00ZLast summer, I took my niece shopping at an urban clothing store in New York City. While she shopped, I couldn’t help but notice the music blaring on the store’s speaker system—it left my ears ringing and my nerves shot. I could only take it for about a half hour before I just had to leave the store.

I’m sure the music was designed to appeal to the younger crowd shopping there—AKA not me!—and certainly music has been shown to impact buying behavior. But it made me wonder: What about the people who work there and can’t leave the store? Does the music impact them?

Now, a new study suggests that background music can influence people in surprising ways that could have special relevance for employers designing their workspaces.

In the study, recently published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, researcher Kevin Kniffin of Cornell University and his colleagues mimicked a workplace by paying university students to participate in an economics game, while listening to music. Participants received tokens (worth money at the end of the experiment) and could choose to anonymously donate some of them to a pool, where they would be multiplied and redistributed among the players. Since players stood to make the most money if everyone gave all of their tokens, the number of tokens donated acted as a measure of their willingness to cooperate.

During the many rounds of the game, participants were randomly assigned to listen to either happy, rhythmic music (e.g., the pop song “I’m Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves) or unhappy, non-rhythmic music (e.g., the heavy metal song “Smokahontas” by Attack Attack!) in the background.

The results showed that participants who listened to happy music were more likely to cooperate, regardless of their age, gender, or academic major, than those who listened to unhappy music.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, if happy music makes us happy and happy people are more cooperative. But that wasn’t exactly what was going on; in a second experiment, researchers found that happy music was linked to increased cooperation whether or not it boosted participants’ mood.

Here, researchers added a control group who didn’t listen to music and measured participants’ moods before, during, and after playing the game. Results again showed that the happy-music group cooperated more than the unhappy or no-music groups. And, while a better mood was tied to greater cooperation, it couldn’t account for the differences between groups. In other words, something else about happy, rhythmic music seemed to be encouraging cooperation.

According to Kniffin, this finding fits with previous research on music showing that it can increase cooperative behavior through synchronization among listeners.

“When people are presented with a steady rhythm or beat, they are inclined to mimic that beat and, in turn, get in sync,” he says. “That translates naturally into more cooperation during decision-making.”

Though results from this study are preliminary—for example, the researchers didn’t consider the impact of participants liking, disliking, or being familiar with the songs—they do point to the fact that music could impact workers, as well as clients or shoppers. Kniffin believes this is especially relevant to employers.

“Compared with expensive off-site team-building retreats, our findings suggest that inexpensive modifications to the office soundscape can boost mood and performance,” he says.

More research needs to be done, though, he says, as too little attention has been paid to how “atmospherics”—the background qualities of the workplace environment—impact worker performance. Some of his previous research has found that even simply having workers eat together can increase job performance; yet the employee social climate is often overlooked.

If his findings on happy music hold, Kniffin believes that they may translate into changes in the workplace that could benefit employees and employers without hurting the bottom line.

Hopefully, that New York department store and others like it will take note.

]]>Last summer, I took my niece shopping at an urban clothing store in New York City. While she shopped, I couldn’t help but notice the music blaring on the store’s speaker system—it left my ears ringing and my nerves shot. I could only take it for about a half hour before I just had to leave the store.
I’m sure the music was designed to appeal to the younger crowd shopping there—AKA not me!—and certainly music has been shown to impact buying behavior. But it made me wonder: What about the people who work there and can’t leave the store? Does the music impact them?
Now, a new study suggests that background music can influence people in surprising ways that could have special relevance for employers designing their workspaces.
In the study, recently published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, researcher Kevin Kniffin of Cornell University and his colleagues mimicked a workplace by paying university students to participate in an economics game, while listening to music. Participants received tokens (worth money at the end of the experiment) and could choose to anonymously donate some of them to a pool, where they would be multiplied and redistributed among the players. Since players stood to make the most money if everyone gave all of their tokens, the number of tokens donated acted as a measure of their willingness to cooperate.
During the many rounds of the game, participants were randomly assigned to listen to either happy, rhythmic music (e.g., the pop song “I’m Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves) or unhappy, non-rhythmic music (e.g., the heavy metal song “Smokahontas” by Attack Attack!) in the background.
The results showed that participants who listened to happy music were more likely to cooperate, regardless of their age, gender, or academic major, than those who listened to unhappy music.
Perhaps that’s not surprising, if happy music makes us happy and happy people are more cooperative. But that wasn’t exactly what was going on; in a second experiment, researchers found that happy music was linked to increased cooperation whether or not it boosted participants’ mood.
Here, researchers added a control group who didn’t listen to music and measured participants’ moods before, during, and after playing the game. Results again showed that the happy-music group cooperated more than the unhappy or no-music groups. And, while a better mood was tied to greater cooperation, it couldn’t account for the differences between groups. In other words, something else about happy, rhythmic music seemed to be encouraging cooperation.
According to Kniffin, this finding fits with previous research on music showing that it can increase cooperative behavior through synchronization among listeners.
“When people are presented with a steady rhythm or beat, they are inclined to mimic that beat and, in turn, get in sync,” he says. “That translates naturally into more cooperation during decision-making.”
Though results from this study are preliminary—for example, the researchers didn’t consider the impact of participants liking, disliking, or being familiar with the songs—they do point to the fact that music could impact workers, as well as clients or shoppers. Kniffin believes this is especially relevant to employers.
“Compared with expensive off-site team-building retreats, our findings suggest that inexpensive modifications to the office soundscape can boost mood and performance,” he says.
More research needs to be done, though, he says, as too little attention has been paid to how “atmospherics”—the background qualities of the workplace environment—impact worker performance. Some of his previous research has found that even simply having workers eat together can increase job performance; yet the employee social climate is often overlooked.
If his findings on happy music hold, Kniffin believes that they may translate into changes in the workplace that could benefit employees and employers without hurting the bottom line.
Hopefully, that New York department store and others like it will take note.cooperation, happiness, music, work, In Brief, Work & Career, Happiness2016-09-22T11:45:00+00:00How to Stop Being a People-Pleaserhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_stop_being_a_people_pleaser
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_stop_being_a_people_pleaser#When:14:00:00ZMany commentators took issue with my claim that happiness comes when we live with total integrity—when we stop people-pleasing and start living more authentically.

I understand entirely why a lot of people fear the sort of transparency and honesty I’m advocating. We are clannish beings, with nervous systems that evolved to profoundly fear being rejected by our tribe. Acceptance can feel like everything, and for some people, it can be a matter of survival.

At the same time, for most of us, it is far better in the long run to be ourselves and risk having people not like us than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from pretending to be someone we’re not.

Does this mean, though, that we never act in a way that doesn’t resonate with our mood? That always express what we’re feeling? That we always say what we’re thinking? Sometimes it’s simply not safe, or smart, to do that. As one commenter recently mused:

Is there anyone reading this who has not had an interaction with a law enforcement officer for at least a minor traffic issue? a tail light out? a parking ticket? And during such an interaction, is telling that officer that you resent being stopped because you believe s/he hasn’t met their quota of fines for the month a wise idea? Or if taking a ticket to court, is it wise to tell the judge you think s/he is a fool? You might think that—but saying so may lead to needing a good attorney.

Granted, a traffic stop is a racial flashpoint and a huge public issue. For some people, a run-in like this one could be lethal, especially if they were to express hostility—however authentic that might be. But there is an enormous difference between living your truth and always saying what’s on your mind. I don’t think that it’s necessary, or even a good idea, in instances like this one to “speak your truth.”

Nor do you need to pretend to be happy about the situation. Being pulled over can be extremely stressful (even life-threatening) and pretending that it isn’t will simply ratchet up your fear response, which is not a good thing. Inauthenticity—in this case, actively pretending to be happy when you’re terrified—tends to increase the fight-or-flight response in both people, and in that way could actually make a scary situation more dangerous.

But it’s entirely possible to internally acknowledge your feelings, while remaining quiet or emotionally unexpressive to those around you.

This is where it gets tricky again. Say you are feeling afraid; is it best to indulge your fear? Even if you don’t tell the officer how frightened you are—or even if you don’t pretend to be happy about the situation—how does one behave authentically in this situation? If you are resentful, is it best to be transparent about your resentment? Should resentment dictate your behavior?

Often this is the way it works: Something happens—or we have a thought or memory—that triggers an emotion. In turn, that emotion triggers behavior.

Sometimes, the behavior is repression—the act of pretending that we aren’t feeling what we actually are feeling. Or an emotion triggers a numbing behavior, so that we don’t really feel something, as when we start to feel bored or anxious and we immediately check our phones. (This doesn’t work, by the way; physiologically our emotions get bigger when we stuff them down. But let’s leave that for another post.)

Emotions trigger loads of behaviors. They may cause us to hug someone we love, or lash out when we feel angry.

So again: If we are trying to live with total integrity, if we are attempting to “live our truth,” does that mean always acting on our feelings?

Again, I don’t think so. Why? Because often it simply isn’t effective. It won’t necessarily make us feel less stressed or more honest. In the same way that we don’t always need to say out loud everything that is on our mind, we don’t need to act on our every emotional impulse. We need to be aware of what we’re feeling, for sure, but we don’t always need to act in the ways that our emotions would dictate.

It can be even more effective to “act as-if” we are already feeling something else. Before you write me off as contradicting myself entirely, hear me out.

Just as emotions tend to trigger behaviors, behavior can also trigger emotion. We know that facial expression alone, for example, without first feeling a corresponding emotion, is often enough to create discernible changes in your nervous system. When you lift the corners of your lips and crinkle your eyes, for example, after a couple of minutes your body will release the feel-good brain chemicals associated with smiling. Or think about the wise (and almost cliched) advice to take some deep breathes when you are feeling stressed. In each of these cases, a particular behavior can help to create a different emotional state than you may be feeling initially. We often think of this as the “fake it ‘til you make it” path to happiness.

There is a catch here, which gets confusing. “Faking it” only works when we aren’t pretending or performing. Consciously faking a smile, for example, to cover negative emotions (what researchers call “surface acting”) tends to increase our distress. This kind of toxic inauthenticity is corrosive to our health (especially our cardiovascular system), and it damages our relationships with others. It also makes it hard for us to access our intuitive or visceral intelligence.

Suppressing or numbing our emotions doesn’t work the way we often want it to. UNLESS—and here is the trick—we consciously foster the emotions that we want to feel in our lives. This is what researchers call “deep acting.”

Deep acting is when we genuinely work to foster specific feelings. When we make an effort to cultivate real happiness, gratitude, hope, and other positive emotions in our lives, we can dramatically increase our well-being—authentically.

Deep acting is what this commenter is asking about:

I’m wondering…if you would suggest that the idea of “acting as if” for treatment would never work? I suggest the use of breathing, self-imagery, posture…to feel better and improve relationships.

When we are talking about the types of research-tested behaviors this commenter suggests, “acting as-if” can be quite different than pretending to feel something that we don’t.

Here’s the difference: Pretending is about hiding or denying our emotions, while “deep acting,” or “acting as-if” is about proactively fostering emotions, starting with an action or behavior.

It’s a fine line, to be sure. Here’s a method I teach my coaching clients for remaining in integrity when when they have an impulse to pretend.

Ask yourself what you are feeling. Are you afraid of what someone else is thinking of you? Are you avoiding an inconvenient truth or difficult emotion?

Allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you are feeling. All emotions are okay; they are a key part of our intelligence and the human experience.

Assess the situation. Can you safely share your feelings with others? Would it make you feel better to do so? If yes, go ahead and share. This might feel risky, but authenticity and vulnerability usually create intimacy and connection—two keys to happiness.

Decide on an appropriate behavior based on how you’d like to feel. If you are afraid, for example, you might want to choose a behavior to calm your fear, like taking deep breaths. If you are feeling low-energy, you might want to do a few jumping jacks to get your blood circulating.

Finally, check back in with yourself to see how you are feeling. Allow whatever comes up for you. You may now be feeling both a sense of calm (from taking a bunch of deep breaths) and a little frightened. It is entirely possible to experience more than one emotion at a time. Or, your blahs might have vanished now that you’ve taken a little walk outside.

Does this work for you? When does it still seem untenable for you to be truthful?

We sometimes become pretty invested in our false selves, in the “representative,” as Glennon Doyle Melton calls it, that we send out into the world instead of showing up fully and authentically as ourselves. We create representatives to protect ourselves, often in response to unstable or abusive situations.

Sometimes, we aren’t yet able to separate our false selves from our real ones. We want to defend the important representative that has worked so hard for us for so long. And that’s okay…so long as we can see where our representative is holding us back, and that it is, of course, the truth that will eventually set us free.

My latest eCourse, The Science of Finding Flow, focuses on so many of these topics — how to really feel your feelings, how to live with total integrity, how to prioritize friendships and nurture important relationships. In 9 self-paced units, you’ll learn to allow your most joyful, productive, energetic, and successful self to emerge. Enroll now or learn more here.

]]>Many commentators took issue with my claim that happiness comes when we live with total integrity—when we stop people-pleasing and start living more authentically.
I understand entirely why a lot of people fear the sort of transparency and honesty I’m advocating. We are clannish beings, with nervous systems that evolved to profoundly fear being rejected by our tribe. Acceptance can feel like everything, and for some people, it can be a matter of survival.
At the same time, for most of us, it is far better in the long run to be ourselves and risk having people not like us than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from pretending to be someone we’re not.
Does this mean, though, that we never act in a way that doesn’t resonate with our mood? That always express what we’re feeling? That we always say what we’re thinking? Sometimes it’s simply not safe, or smart, to do that. As one commenter recently mused:
Is there anyone reading this who has not had an interaction with a law enforcement officer for at least a minor traffic issue? a tail light out? a parking ticket? And during such an interaction, is telling that officer that you resent being stopped because you believe s/he hasn’t met their quota of fines for the month a wise idea? Or if taking a ticket to court, is it wise to tell the judge you think s/he is a fool? You might think that—but saying so may lead to needing a good attorney.
Granted, a traffic stop is a racial flashpoint and a huge public issue. For some people, a run-in like this one could be lethal, especially if they were to express hostility—however authentic that might be. But there is an enormous difference between living your truth and always saying what’s on your mind. I don’t think that it’s necessary, or even a good idea, in instances like this one to “speak your truth.”
Nor do you need to pretend to be happy about the situation. Being pulled over can be extremely stressful (even life-threatening) and pretending that it isn’t will simply ratchet up your fear response, which is not a good thing. Inauthenticity—in this case, actively pretending to be happy when you’re terrified—tends to increase the fight-or-flight response in both people, and in that way could actually make a scary situation more dangerous.
But it’s entirely possible to internally acknowledge your feelings, while remaining quiet or emotionally unexpressive to those around you.
This is where it gets tricky again. Say you are feeling afraid; is it best to indulge your fear? Even if you don’t tell the officer how frightened you are—or even if you don’t pretend to be happy about the situation—how does one behave authentically in this situation? If you are resentful, is it best to be transparent about your resentment? Should resentment dictate your behavior?
Often this is the way it works: Something happens—or we have a thought or memory—that triggers an emotion. In turn, that emotion triggers behavior.
Sometimes, the behavior is repression—the act of pretending that we aren’t feeling what we actually are feeling. Or an emotion triggers a numbing behavior, so that we don’t really feel something, as when we start to feel bored or anxious and we immediately check our phones. (This doesn’t work, by the way; physiologically our emotions get bigger when we stuff them down. But let’s leave that for another post.)
Emotions trigger loads of behaviors. They may cause us to hug someone we love, or lash out when we feel angry.
So again: If we are trying to live with total integrity, if we are attempting to “live our truth,” does that mean always acting on our feelings?
Again, I don’t think so. Why? Because often it simply isn’t effective. It won’t necessarily make us feel less stressed or more honest. In the same way that we don’t always need to say out loud everything that is on our mind, we don’t need to act on our every emotional impulse. We need to be aware of what we’re feeling, for sure, but we don’t always need to act in the ways that our emotions would dictate.
It can be even more effective to “act as-if” we are already feeling something else. Before you write me off as contradicting myself entirely, hear me out.
Just as emotions tend to trigger behaviors, behavior can also trigger emotion. We know that facial expression alone, for example, without first feeling a corresponding emotion, is often enough to create discernible changes in your nervous system. When you lift the corners of your lips and crinkle your eyes, for example, after a couple of minutes your body will release the feel-good brain chemicals associated with smiling. Or think about the wise (and almost cliched) advice to take some deep breathes when you are feeling stressed. In each of these cases, a particular behavior can help to create a different emotional state than you may be feeling initially. We often think of this as the “fake it ‘til you make it” path to happiness.
There is a catch here, which gets confusing. “Faking it” only works when we aren’t pretending or performing. Consciously faking a smile, for example, to cover negative emotions (what researchers call “surface acting”) tends to increase our distress. This kind of toxic inauthenticity is corrosive to our health (especially our cardiovascular system), and it damages our relationships with others. It also makes it hard for us to access our intuitive or visceral intelligence.
Suppressing or numbing our emotions doesn’t work the way we often want it to. UNLESS—and here is the trick—we consciously foster the emotions that we want to feel in our lives. This is what researchers call “deep acting.”
Deep acting is when we genuinely work to foster specific feelings. When we make an effort to cultivate real happiness, gratitude, hope, and other positive emotions in our lives, we can dramatically increase our well-being—authentically.
Deep acting is what this commenter is asking about:
I’m wondering…if you would suggest that the idea of “acting as if” for treatment would never work? I suggest the use of breathing, self-imagery, posture…to feel better and improve relationships.
When we are talking about the types of research-tested behaviors this commenter suggests, “acting as-if” can be quite different than pretending to feel something that we don’t.
Here’s the difference: Pretending is about hiding or denying our emotions, while “deep acting,” or “acting as-if” is about proactively fostering emotions, starting with an action or behavior.
It’s a fine line, to be sure. Here’s a method I teach my coaching clients for remaining in integrity when when they have an impulse to pretend.
Ask yourself what you are feeling. Are you afraid of what someone else is thinking of you? Are you avoiding an inconvenient truth or difficult emotion?
Allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you are feeling. All emotions are okay; they are a key part of our intelligence and the human experience.
Assess the situation. Can you safely share your feelings with others? Would it make you feel better to do so? If yes, go ahead and share. This might feel risky, but authenticity and vulnerability usually create intimacy and connection—two keys to happiness.
Decide on an appropriate behavior based on how you’d like to feel. If you are afraid, for example, you might want to choose a behavior to calm your fear, like taking deep breaths. If you are feeling low-energy, you might want to do a few jumping jacks to get your blood circulating.
Finally, check back in with yourself to see how you are feeling. Allow whatever comes up for you. You may now be feeling both a sense of calm (from taking a bunch of deep breaths) and a little frightened. It is entirely possible to experience more than one emotion at a time. Or, your blahs might have vanished now that you’ve taken a little walk outside.
Does this work for you?&nbsp; When does it still seem untenable for you to be truthful?
We sometimes become pretty invested in our false selves, in the “representative,” as Glennon Doyle Melton calls it, that we send out into the world instead of showing up fully and authentically as ourselves. We create representatives to protect ourselves, often in response to unstable or abusive situations.
Sometimes, we aren’t yet able to separate our false selves from our real ones. We want to defend the important representative that has worked so hard for us for so long. And that’s okay…so long as we can see where our representative is holding us back, and that it is, of course, the truth that will eventually set us free.
My latest eCourse, The Science of Finding Flow, focuses on so many of these topics — how to really feel your feelings, how to live with total integrity, how to prioritize friendships and nurture important relationships. In 9 self-paced units, you’ll learn to allow your most joyful, productive, energetic, and successful self to emerge. Enroll now or learn more here.emotions, honesty, stress, trust, truth, Features, Mind & Body, Big Ideas, Happiness2016-09-19T14:00:00+00:00Grit Needs Passion, Not Fearhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/grit_needs_passion_not_fear
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/grit_needs_passion_not_fear#When:10:34:00Z

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
— Albert Einstein

When I first started writing about how to foster “grit” in kids years ago, I thought I’d found a parenting silver bullet.

Early research from the celebrated psychologist Angela Duckworth (now collected in her excellent new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance) showed that grit—or “perseverance and passion for long-term goals”—is one of the best predictors of elite performance, whether in the classroom or in the workforce. This was great news, it seemed to me, because while we can’t control kids’ (or our own) intelligence, we can grow grit, dramatically influencing their odds of succeeding.

Let me explain. On the one hand, I credit most of my success to my single-minded and relentless pursuit of task completion. In high school and college, I studied harder than anyone I knew. I did ALL my homework, sometimes more than once. (My high school English teacher, Michael Mulligan, still publicly teases me for re-writing the paper I wrote on the Lord of the Flies a half dozen times, a blatant grade-grubber trying desperately to improve the B+ he originally gave me.)

On the other hand, I also credit the anxiety disorder I suffered from in my early 20s to my single-minded and relentless pursuit of task completion. See, until my mid-30s, I did pretty much everything I thought I “should” do, as perfectly as I could. I also did everything everyone else thought I should do. I people-pleased up the wazoo.

I was nothing if not persistent. I would have maxed out Duckworth’s Grit Scale, giving myself a 5 out of 5 on items like this:

“I don’t give up easily”

“I am a hard worker”

“I finish whatever I begin”

“I am diligent”

“I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge”

But actually, I wasn’t all that gritty in the way that Duckworth actually defines grit (vs. how she measures it). Duckworth defines grit as persistence AND passion towards one’s long-term goals. Mostly, I was just perfectionistic and persistent.

In many realms, I was missing the passion part of the grit equation. I was driven by fear, not love. I knew exactly what other people wanted me to pursue, and I could do it. And because I was so clear about what other people expected of me, I was sometimes a little shaky about what I really wanted to pursue for myself.

So that is why I deeply believe that grit isn’t something we should measure in adolescents to see if they can hack the stress that an academic institution is going to hurl their way. Nor should we admire or foster a character trait we call “grit” but that is really relentless, persistent perfectionism, absent the intrinsic motivation. Passionless persistence might lead to achievement, but it is joyless, anxious achievement at best.

But true grit—the kind that is equal measures passion and persistence—is a solid strategy for both success AND happiness. And it is something we can easily foster in ourselves, and in our children.

First, find and fuel passion. If you are a parent or teacher looking to foster grit in kids, the first step is to let go of what you want for them, and watch for what they are passionate about. Then, simply support their passions.

In order for kids to even know what they are interested in, they need exposure to a lot of different things. They will never know that they are passionate about tennis or Shakespeare or rock climbing or piano if they never have a chance to try those things out. Parents, teachers, and coaches are important here; we must be willing and able to provide racquets and lessons and instruments. The first sparks of a passion need oxygen before they will ignite.

Moreover, we must be willing to let an initial interest develop from fun, and from play. It has to have an ease to it at first. Adults can encourage, but they must remember that joy is their best tactic at this stage. A true passion never begins with hard work and practice—it begins with genuine interest and fun.

You can do this for yourself, too: Pay attention to what you actually yearn for, and practice ignoring what other (well-meaning) people expect of you or even want for you. Does the thought of a particular project or activity make you feel light and free, or does it make you feel heavy? Pushing yourself towards the things that you dread may make you persistent, but it will not, ultimately, make you gritty. Or happy.

Second, practice tolerating discomfort. Given that life includes a boatload of disappointment, risk, pain, and even failure, we need to develop an ironic comfort with discomfort if we are going to be able to persist in the face of challenge towards our goals.

The key is to notice where your comfort zone is, because it is often the very thing that is blocking your success and happiness. Perfectionism, ironically, used to be my comfort zone, for example. I was most “comfortable” relentlessly fulfilling everyone else’s expectations of me, and I felt uneasy and uncomfortable doing things that I feared would let other people down. It was hard for me to have the courage to pursue my own passions.

But we obviously need to have the courage to do the things that make us profoundly uncomfortable without becoming overly anxious or stressed out. Sometimes hard things are just hard things: There is difficulty, or even pain, but it isn’t worthy of a full-blown stress response. There isn’t actually anything to be afraid of.

Have difficult conversations. Take risks in relationships by showing people who you really are, or sharing what you are truly feeling. Let yourself notice when other people are suffering, and reach out to them; their discomfort, too, is nothing to be afraid of. Do the right thing, even when the right thing is hard.

These days, I don’t really know where I’d score on Duckworth’s Grit Scale. I practice being gritty in some arenas, downright flaky in others. In the same way that having a super-high IQ can make people so socially awkward that their relationships suffer, I think having a super-high persistence score used to threaten my happiness.

So does grit matter more than intelligence, as Duckworth’s early research implied?

It turns out that grit, at least the way it’s been measured for research, is no silver bullet. A recent meta-analysis of research on grit concluded that Duckworth’s persistence-oriented grit scale doesn’t actually do as great a job at predicting success as the original research led us to believe.

At the same time, true grit—persistence and passion—is clearly something we want both for our kids and for ourselves. Fortunately, the life-skills that make us gritty can be learned and practiced. When we identify what we are passionate about, and build the skills we need to be persistent in our pursuit of these passions…watch out world. Little else will have a larger impact.

If you need help refueling your passion in life, check out my latest eCourse, The Science of Finding Flow. In 9 self-paced units, you’ll learn to optimize your brain (to detox, focus, feel, and flourish) so that you can allow your most joyful, productive, energetic, and successful self to emerge. Greater Good Science Center members receive 20% off and the proceeds directly support the Greater Good Science Center. Enroll now or learn more here.

]]>It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
— Albert Einstein
When I first started writing about how to foster “grit” in kids years ago, I thought I’d found a parenting silver bullet.
Early research from the celebrated psychologist Angela Duckworth (now collected in her excellent new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance) showed that grit—or “perseverance and passion for long-term goals”—is one of the best predictors of elite performance, whether in the classroom or in the workforce. This was great news, it seemed to me, because while we can’t control kids’ (or our own) intelligence, we can grow grit, dramatically influencing their odds of succeeding.
Let me explain. On the one hand, I credit most of my success to my single-minded and relentless pursuit of task completion. In high school and college, I studied harder than anyone I knew. I did ALL my homework, sometimes more than once. (My high school English teacher, Michael Mulligan, still publicly teases me for re-writing the paper I wrote on the Lord of the Flies a half dozen times, a blatant grade-grubber trying desperately to improve the B+ he originally gave me.)
On the other hand, I also credit the anxiety disorder I suffered from in my early 20s to my single-minded and relentless pursuit of task completion. See, until my mid-30s, I did pretty much everything I thought I “should” do, as perfectly as I could. I also did everything everyone else thought I should do. I people-pleased up the wazoo.
I was nothing if not persistent. I would have maxed out Duckworth’s Grit Scale, giving myself a 5 out of 5 on items like this:
“I don’t give up easily”
“I am a hard worker”
“I finish whatever I begin”
“I am diligent”
“I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge”
But actually, I wasn’t all that gritty in the way that Duckworth actually defines grit (vs. how she measures it). Duckworth defines grit as persistence AND passion towards one’s long-term goals. Mostly, I was just perfectionistic and persistent.
In many realms, I was missing the passion part of the grit equation. I was driven by fear, not love. I knew exactly what other people wanted me to pursue, and I could do it. And because I was so clear about what other people expected of me, I was sometimes a little shaky about what I really wanted to pursue for myself.
So that is why I deeply believe that grit isn’t something we should measure in adolescents to see if they can hack the stress that an academic institution is going to hurl their way. Nor should we admire or foster a character trait we call “grit” but that is really relentless, persistent perfectionism, absent the intrinsic motivation. Passionless persistence might lead to achievement, but it is joyless, anxious achievement at best.
But true grit—the kind that is equal measures passion and persistence—is a solid strategy for both success AND happiness. And it is something we can easily foster in ourselves, and in our children.
First, find and fuel passion. If you are a parent or teacher looking to foster grit in kids, the first step is to let go of what you want for them, and watch for what they are passionate about. Then, simply support their passions.
In order for kids to even know what they are interested in, they need exposure to a lot of different things. They will never know that they are passionate about tennis or Shakespeare or rock climbing or piano if they never have a chance to try those things out. Parents, teachers, and coaches are important here; we must be willing and able to provide racquets and lessons and instruments. The first sparks of a passion need oxygen before they will ignite.
Moreover, we must be willing to let an initial interest develop from fun, and from play. It has to have an ease to it at first. Adults can encourage, but they must remember that joy is their best tactic at this stage. A true passion never begins with hard work and practice—it begins with genuine interest and fun.
You can do this for yourself, too: Pay attention to what you actually yearn for, and practice ignoring what other (well-meaning) people expect of you or even want for you. Does the thought of a particular project or activity make you feel light and free, or does it make you feel heavy? Pushing yourself towards the things that you dread may make you persistent, but it will not, ultimately, make you gritty. Or happy.
Second, practice tolerating discomfort. Given that life includes a boatload of disappointment, risk, pain, and even failure, we need to develop an ironic comfort with discomfort if we are going to be able to persist in the face of challenge towards our goals.
The key is to notice where your comfort zone is, because it is often the very thing that is blocking your success and happiness. Perfectionism, ironically, used to be my comfort zone, for example. I was most “comfortable” relentlessly fulfilling everyone else’s expectations of me, and I felt uneasy and uncomfortable doing things that I feared would let other people down. It was hard for me to have the courage to pursue my own passions.
But we obviously need to have the courage to do the things that make us profoundly uncomfortable without becoming overly anxious or stressed out. Sometimes hard things are just hard things: There is difficulty, or even pain, but it isn’t worthy of a full-blown stress response. There isn’t actually anything to be afraid of.
The simplest way to increase our ability (and, frankly, willingness) to experience discomfort is to simply put ourselves in situations that make us uncomfortable. Take baby steps, and practice staying calm despite the discomfort. Keep taking deep breaths. Keep relaxing your shoulders. Notice your discomfort, and welcome it. It’s nothing to be afraid of.
Have difficult conversations. Take risks in relationships by showing people who you really are, or sharing what you are truly feeling. Let yourself notice when other people are suffering, and reach out to them; their discomfort, too, is nothing to be afraid of. Do the right thing, even when the right thing is hard.
These days, I don’t really know where I’d score on Duckworth’s Grit Scale. I practice being gritty in some arenas, downright flaky in others. In the same way that having a super-high IQ can make people so socially awkward that their relationships suffer, I think having a super-high persistence score used to threaten my happiness.
So does grit matter more than intelligence, as Duckworth’s early research implied?
It turns out that grit, at least the way it’s been measured for research, is no silver bullet. A recent meta-analysis of research on grit concluded that Duckworth’s persistence-oriented grit scale doesn’t actually do as great a job at predicting success as the original research led us to believe.
At the same time, true grit—persistence and passion—is clearly something we want both for our kids and for ourselves. Fortunately, the life-skills that make us gritty can be learned and practiced. When we identify what we are passionate about, and build the skills we need to be persistent in our pursuit of these passions…watch out world. Little else will have a larger impact.
If you need help refueling your passion in life, check out my latest eCourse, The Science of Finding Flow. In 9 self-paced units, you’ll learn to optimize your brain (to detox, focus, feel, and flourish) so that you can allow your most joyful, productive, energetic, and successful self to emerge. Greater Good Science Center members receive 20% off and the proceeds directly support the Greater Good Science Center. Enroll now or learn more here.children, happiness, parenting, stress, work, Features, Family & Couples, Work & Career, Happiness2016-08-30T10:34:00+00:00How to Bring Humor to Meditationhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_bring_humor_to_meditation
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_bring_humor_to_meditation#When:09:54:00ZFrom the outside, meditation appears to be a thoroughly serious endeavor. You have to sit down, dutifully count your breaths and rein in your wandering mind, and practice this every day whether it’s fun or not.

While Tan acknowledges that there are other routes to mastering meditation (including sheer discipline and will), his focus is on joy. The book—peppered with cartoons in every chapter—teaches practices and principles for cultivating mindfulness that emphasize gentleness and ease, and lead to a life suffused with positive feeling.

“With practice, joy can become your personality and your whole life,” Tan writes. “What is neutral will become joyful, and what is joyful will become even more joyful.” He himself is living proof of this philosophy—his official title while at Google, printed on his business card, was “Jolly Good Fellow.”

Tan encourages lightness and playfulness in the way we think about mindfulness training in the first place. In a chapter called “Happiness Is Full of Crap,” he mentions teachings that compare the mind to “a piece of pure gold inside a big ball of cattle dung.” (“Great spiritual teachers tend to be funny people,” he observes.) In other words, we all have happiness within us; we just have to clear away the nasty habits of thinking that obscure it, which is part of the goal of mind training.

One of the practices he recommends is the ten-minute “Puppy Dog Meditation,” which has five steps that correspond to training a puppy:

Relax: “Relax and allow your puppy [mind] to wander, but if she gets too far away, gently and lovingly carry her back.”

Rejoice: “Now, the puppy is familiar with you and loves you, and she likes to sit next to you. When she does, you rejoice. If you catch her wandering, also rejoice at having such a lovely puppy before gently bringing her back.”

Resolve: “Now the puppy is a young dog and is ready for training. During training, you resolve to firmly enforce discipline [attention], in a gentle and loving way.”

Refine: “Now that your young dog is properly trained, it is time to refine her skills [attend to the subtle nature of the breath].”

Release: “Your dog is well trained and can be unleashed. . . . Let go of all effort and allow the mind to just be.”

In another, particularly delightful practice, Tan recommends that we take a moment every hour to wish for two people at our workplace to be happy, thinking, “I wish for this person to be happy, and I wish for that person to be happy.”

“If you like, you may pretend you are firing a ‘happiness ray gun’ at them and make ‘pew, pew’ sound effects in your head. Batteries not required,” Tan adds.

Lest we think all this humor is only for the innately cheerful, Tan assures us that he isn’t a naturally happy person; in fact, he was miserable for most of his childhood. Since then, he’s sometimes battled intense feelings of worthlessness and periods of overwhelming suffering in his life. But he now believes that humor is available to us even in moments of pain, at least some of the time.

Amidst all the cartoons and jokes, it’s easy to forget that Tan himself is extraordinarily serious about mindfulness. He’s been practicing for 21 years, and he now meditates for three hours a day. Although anyone can get a hint of joy from a calming, mindful breath or a short loving-kindness meditation, it takes dedication to build a life where joy is the default state.

Tan’s advice for those who want to follow in his footsteps? “Don’t stop and don’t strain.” Practice, but not to the point of tension and rigidity. Be dedicated and persistent, but gentle and lighthearted at the same time. That is the path to joy.

]]>From the outside, meditation appears to be a thoroughly serious endeavor. You have to sit down, dutifully count your breaths and rein in your wandering mind, and practice this every day whether it’s fun or not.
But that isn’t Chade-Meng Tan’s approach to mindfulness. The founding chair of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which started as a mindfulness class at Google and now trains employees around the world, Tan lives by the motto that “life is too important to be taken seriously.” And he adopts the same attitude toward cultivating mindfulness—outlined in his new book, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within.
While Tan acknowledges that there are other routes to mastering meditation (including sheer discipline and will), his focus is on joy. The book—peppered with cartoons in every chapter—teaches practices and principles for cultivating mindfulness that emphasize gentleness and ease, and lead to a life suffused with positive feeling.
“With practice, joy can become your personality and your whole life,” Tan writes. “What is neutral will become joyful, and what is joyful will become even more joyful.” He himself is living proof of this philosophy—his official title while at Google, printed on his business card, was “Jolly Good Fellow.”
Tan encourages lightness and playfulness in the way we think about mindfulness training in the first place. In a chapter called “Happiness Is Full of Crap,” he mentions teachings that compare the mind to “a piece of pure gold inside a big ball of cattle dung.” (“Great spiritual teachers tend to be funny people,” he observes.) In other words, we all have happiness within us; we just have to clear away the nasty habits of thinking that obscure it, which is part of the goal of mind training.
One of the practices he recommends is the ten-minute “Puppy Dog Meditation,” which has five steps that correspond to training a puppy:
Relax: “Relax and allow your puppy [mind] to wander, but if she gets too far away, gently and lovingly carry her back.”
Rejoice: “Now, the puppy is familiar with you and loves you, and she likes to sit next to you. When she does, you rejoice. If you catch her wandering, also rejoice at having such a lovely puppy before gently bringing her back.”
Resolve: “Now the puppy is a young dog and is ready for training. During training, you resolve to firmly enforce discipline [attention], in a gentle and loving way.”
Refine: “Now that your young dog is properly trained, it is time to refine her skills [attend to the subtle nature of the breath].”
Release: “Your dog is well trained and can be unleashed. . . . Let go of all effort and allow the mind to just be.”
In another, particularly delightful practice, Tan recommends that we take a moment every hour to wish for two people at our workplace to be happy, thinking, “I wish for this person to be happy, and I wish for that person to be happy.”
“If you like, you may pretend you are firing a ‘happiness ray gun’ at them and make ‘pew, pew’ sound effects in your head. Batteries not required,” Tan adds.
This is a micro version of loving-kindness meditation, where you generate feelings of goodwill and warmth toward others by wishing them well. Loving-kindness meditation has been shown to generate more positive attitudes toward the self and others and more positive emotions, which in turn can lead to a greater sense of connection to others, improved vagal tone (a measure of cardiac health), fewer symptoms of illness, higher life satisfaction, and less depression.
Lest we think all this humor is only for the innately cheerful, Tan assures us that he isn’t a naturally happy person; in fact, he was miserable for most of his childhood. Since then, he’s sometimes battled intense feelings of worthlessness and periods of overwhelming suffering in his life. But he now believes that humor is available to us even in moments of pain, at least some of the time.
Research backs him up: There’s some evidence that humor can help us cope with traumatic situations. Laughter releases dopamine, increases blood flow, and strengthens the heart. In one study, humor was even more effective than positivity at alleviating negative feelings. The benefits of laughter are no laughing matter.
And mindfulness isn’t just for happy times, either. Research suggests that mindfulness and mindfulness-based therapies can help students coping with failure and self-doubt, help veterans battling post-traumatic stress disorder, and help those suffering from depression and anxiety.
Amidst all the cartoons and jokes, it’s easy to forget that Tan himself is extraordinarily serious about mindfulness. He’s been practicing for 21 years, and he now meditates for three hours a day. Although anyone can get a hint of joy from a calming, mindful breath or a short loving-kindness meditation, it takes dedication to build a life where joy is the default state.
Tan’s advice for those who want to follow in his footsteps? “Don’t stop and don’t strain.” Practice, but not to the point of tension and rigidity. Be dedicated and persistent, but gentle and lighthearted at the same time. That is the path to joy.
Laughing Buddha photo by Petteri Sulonen / CC BY 2.0happiness, meditation, mindfulness, positive emotions, Book Reviews, Mind & Body, Happiness, Mindfulness2016-08-25T09:54:00+00:00Do You Have a Negative Attitude about Aging?http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/do_you_have_negative_attitude_about_aging
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/do_you_have_negative_attitude_about_aging#When:08:32:00ZEveryone reacts differently to stressful events, but new research, published last week in the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, shows that our outlook on aging could affect how we deal with the stress of daily life.

Past research on how older adults react to stress has produced a mixed bag of results, according to Jennifer Bellingtier, a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University, and lead author on the new study. Some studies show that older individuals handle stress better compared to their younger peers, while others find older adults are worse off. Some show that both groups fare about the same. “We thought aging attitudes could be a factor that explains why these results are all over the place,” Bellingtier says.

“The research base is definitely building that it’s important to have positive attitudes toward aging,” she explains. Adults who hold a more negative view of aging report lower levels of life satisfaction, well-being, and social supports, and they’re more likely to be hospitalized or to die young.

To find out if aging attitudes could also influence stress responses day to day, the researchers sent nine days’ worth of surveys to 43 adults between 60 and 96 years old. On day one, the survey assessed participants’ general attitudes toward aging (“I am as happy now as I was when I was younger,” for example). For the remaining eight days, participants filled out surveys before bed about any stressful events — such as disagreements or health problems — and their moods.

As the team predicted, stressful events had little effect on the moods of adults with positive attitudes toward aging. On the other hand, participants with more negative views about aging had stronger emotional reactions to daily stressors.

The takeaway, according to Bellingtier, is that it’s not just hypothetical, future events like hospitalizations that attitude can influence. “What we’re adding is that it’s also affecting how you respond to daily life,” Bellingtier says. “It’s going to affect you right now.”

There are, however, several factors that affect the generalizability of these results. The participants were mostly women, and the study group was relatively small (though Bellingtier notes that the team has nine data points for almost every participant, which makes the data set more statistically powerful than other studies with a similarly small sample size). Additionally, all the study participants were from the United States.

“When you’re looking at aging attitudes, those are always in a cultural context,” Bellingtier says. In the U.S., growing older is not typically seen as a positive thing; in the media, for example, older adults tend to be portrayed as a burden or the butt of jokes. Many other cultures view their elders as wise and worthy of respect. More research is needed to find out if those attitudes protect older adults in other cultures from day-to-day stress as well.

But given the growing evidence that what goes on in our minds can influence what goes on in our bodies, maybe we could all use an attitude adjustment.

]]>Everyone reacts differently to stressful events, but new research, published last week in the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, shows that our outlook on aging could affect how we deal with the stress of daily life.
Past research on how older adults react to stress has produced a mixed bag of results, according to Jennifer Bellingtier, a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University, and lead author on the new study. Some studies show that older individuals handle stress better compared to their younger peers, while others find older adults are worse off. Some show that both groups fare about the same. “We thought aging attitudes could be a factor that explains why these results are all over the place,” Bellingtier says.
“The research base is definitely building that it’s important to have positive attitudes toward aging,” she explains. Adults who hold a more negative view of aging report lower levels of life satisfaction, well-being, and social supports, and they’re more likely to be hospitalized or to die young.
To find out if aging attitudes could also influence stress responses day to day, the researchers sent nine days’ worth of surveys to 43 adults between 60 and 96 years old. On day one, the survey assessed participants’ general attitudes toward aging (“I am as happy now as I was when I was younger,” for example). For the remaining eight days, participants filled out surveys before bed about any stressful events — such as disagreements or health problems — and their moods.
As the team predicted, stressful events had little effect on the moods of adults with positive attitudes toward aging. On the other hand, participants with more negative views about aging had stronger emotional reactions to daily stressors.
The takeaway, according to Bellingtier, is that it’s not just hypothetical, future events like hospitalizations that attitude can influence. “What we’re adding is that it’s also affecting how you respond to daily life,” Bellingtier says. “It’s going to affect you right now.”
There are, however, several factors that affect the generalizability of these results. The participants were mostly women, and the study group was relatively small (though Bellingtier notes that the team has nine data points for almost every participant, which makes the data set more statistically powerful than other studies with a similarly small sample size). Additionally, all the study participants were from the United States.
“When you’re looking at aging attitudes, those are always in a cultural context,” Bellingtier says. In the U.S., growing older is not typically seen as a positive thing; in the media, for example, older adults tend to be portrayed as a burden or the butt of jokes. Many other cultures view their elders as wise and worthy of respect. More research is needed to find out if those attitudes protect older adults in other cultures from day-to-day stress as well.
But given the growing evidence that what goes on in our minds can influence what goes on in our bodies, maybe we could all use an attitude adjustment.
This article was originally published on Pacific Standard. Read the original article.age, health, stress, In Brief, Big Ideas, Happiness2016-08-10T08:32:00+00:00Why It Doesn’t Pay to be a People-Pleaserhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_it_doesnt_pay_to_be_a_people_pleaser
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_it_doesnt_pay_to_be_a_people_pleaser#When:10:13:00ZPeople ask me all the time what the secret to happiness is. “If you had to pick just one thing,” they wonder, “what would be the most important thing for leading a happy life?”

Ten years ago, I would have told you a regular gratitude practice was the most important thing—and while that is still my favorite instant happiness booster, my answer has changed. I believe the most important thing for happiness is living truthfully. Here’s the specific advice I recently gave my kids:

Live with total integrity. Be transparent, honest, and authentic. Do not ever waiver from this; white lies and false smiles quickly snowball into a life lived out of alignment. It is better to be yourself and risk having people not like you than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from pretending to be someone you’re not, or professing to like something that you don’t. I promise you: Pretending will rob you of joy.

I’ve spent the better part of my life as a people-pleaser, trying to meet other people’s expectations, trying to keep everyone happy and liking me. But when we are trying to please others, we are usually out of sync with our own wants and needs. It’s not that it’s bad to be thinking of others. It’s that pleasing others is not the same as helping others.

People pleasing, in my extensive personal experience, is a process of guessing what other people want, or what will make them think favorably of us, and then acting accordingly. It’s an often subtle and usually unconscious attempt at manipulating other people’s perceptions of us. Anytime we pretend to be or feel something that we aren’t, we’re out of integrity with ourselves.

And anytime we’re doing something that is more about influencing what others think of us than it is about authentically expressing ourselves—even something as simple as a Facebook post that makes it seem like we are having a better day than we actually are—we end up out of integrity with ourselves.

Being out of integrity has pretty serious consequences for our happiness, and for our relationships. Here’s what happens when we aren’t being authentic.

1. We don’t actually fool anyone

Say you are at work, and you’re doing your best to put on a happy face even though your home life is feeling shaky. You may not want to reveal to your work friends that you and your significant other had a major fight over the weekend, but if you pretend that you are okay—and you’re not—you’ll probably make the people around you feel worse, too. Why?

We humans aren’t actually very good at hiding how we are feeling. We exhibit micro-expressions that the people we are with might not know they are registering but that trigger mirror neurons—so a little part of their brain thinks that they are feeling our negative feelings. So trying to suppress negative emotions when we are talking with someone—like when we don’t want to trouble someone else with our own distress—actually increases stress levels of both people more than if we had shared our distress in the first place. (It also reduces rapport and inhibits the connection between two people.)

2. We find it harder to focus

Pretending takes a huge conscious effort—it’s an act of self-control that drains your brain of its power to focus and do deep work. That’s because performing or pretending to be or feel something you’re not requires tremendous willpower.

Tons of research suggests that our ability to repeatedly exert our self-control is actually quite limited. Like a muscle that tires and can no longer perform at its peak strength after a workout, our self-control is diminished by previous efforts at control, even if those efforts take place in a totally different realm.

So that little fib at the water cooler you told in order to make yourself seem happier than you are is going to make it hard for you to focus later in the afternoon. A performance or any attempt to hide who you really are, or pretend to be something you aren’t, is going to make it harder later to control your attention and your thoughts, and to regulate your emotions. It’ll increase the odds that you react more aggressively to a provocation, eat more tempting snacks, engage in riskier behaviors, and—this one is pretty compelling to me—perform more poorly on tasks that require executive function, like managing your time, planning, or organizing.

3. You’ll become more stressed and anxious

Let’s just call it like it is: Pretending to be or feel something that you don’t—even if it is a small thing, and even if it is relatively meaningless, and even if it is meant to protect someone else—is a lie.

And lying, even if we do it a lot, or are good at it, is very stressful to our brains and our bodies. The polygraph test depends on this: “Lie Detectors” don’t actually detect lies, but rather they detect the subconscious stress and fear that lying causes. These tests sense changes in our skin electricity, pulse rate, and breathing. They also detect when someone’s vocal pitch has changed in a nearly imperceptible way, a consequence of tension in the body that tightens vocal chords.

The physiological changes that lie detectors sense are caused by glucocorticoids, hormones that are released during a stress response. And as you well know, stress hormones are bad news for your health and happiness over the long run.

Research shows that people who are given instructions for how to lie less in their day-to-day lives are actually able to lie less, and when they do, their physical health improves. For example, they report less trouble sleeping, less tension, fewer headaches, and fewer sore throats. These improvements in health are likely caused by the relative absence of a stress response.

And that’s not all: When the people in the above study lied less, they also reported improvements in their relationships and less anxiety.

We don’t lie or pretend or perform all the time, of course. But when we do, it’s important to see the consequences: increased stress, decreased willpower, impaired relationships. Although we might actually be trying to feel better by putting on a happy face for others, pretending always backfires in the end. Living inauthentically makes life hard and cuts us off from our sweet spot—that place where we have both ease and power.

If you need help living your most authentic life, check out my latest eCourse, The Science of Finding Flow. In 9 self-paced units, you’ll learn to optimize your brain (to detox, focus, feel, and flourish) so that you can allow your most joyful, productive, energetic, and successful self to emerge. Greater Good Science Center members receive 20% off and the proceeds directly support the Greater Good Science Center. Enroll now or learn more here.

]]>People ask me all the time what the secret to happiness is. “If you had to pick just one thing,” they wonder, “what would be the most important thing for leading a happy life?”
Ten years ago, I would have told you a regular gratitude practice was the most important thing—and while that is still my favorite instant happiness booster, my answer has changed. I believe the most important thing for happiness is living truthfully. Here’s the specific advice I recently gave my kids:
Live with total integrity. Be transparent, honest, and authentic. Do not ever waiver from this; white lies and false smiles quickly snowball into a life lived out of alignment. It is better to be yourself and risk having people not like you than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from pretending to be someone you’re not, or professing to like something that you don’t. I promise you: Pretending will rob you of joy.
I’ve spent the better part of my life as a people-pleaser, trying to meet other people’s expectations, trying to keep everyone happy and liking me. But when we are trying to please others, we are usually out of sync with our own wants and needs. It’s not that it’s bad to be thinking of others. It’s that pleasing others is not the same as helping others.&nbsp;
People pleasing, in my extensive personal experience, is a process of guessing what other people want, or what will make them think favorably of us, and then acting accordingly. It’s an often subtle and usually unconscious attempt at manipulating other people’s perceptions of us. Anytime we pretend to be or feel something that we aren’t, we’re out of integrity with ourselves.
And anytime we’re doing something that is more about influencing what others think of us than it is about authentically expressing ourselves—even something as simple as a Facebook post that makes it seem like we are having a better day than we actually are—we end up out of integrity with ourselves.
Being out of integrity has pretty serious consequences for our happiness, and for our relationships. Here’s what happens when we aren’t being authentic.
1. We don’t actually fool anyone
Say you are at work, and you’re doing your best to put on a happy face even though your home life is feeling shaky. You may not want to reveal to your work friends that you and your significant other had a major fight over the weekend, but if you pretend that you are okay—and you’re not—you’ll probably make the people around you feel worse, too. Why?
We humans aren’t actually very good at hiding how we are feeling. We exhibit micro-expressions that the people we are with might not know they are registering but that trigger mirror neurons—so a little part of their brain thinks that they are feeling our negative feelings. So trying to suppress negative emotions when we are talking with someone—like when we don’t want to trouble someone else with our own distress—actually increases stress levels of both people more than if we had shared our distress in the first place. (It also reduces rapport and inhibits the connection between two people.)
2. We find it harder to focus
Pretending takes a huge conscious effort—it’s an act of self-control that drains your brain of its power to focus and do deep work. That’s because performing or pretending to be or feel something you’re not requires tremendous willpower.
Tons of research suggests that our ability to repeatedly exert our self-control is actually quite limited. Like a muscle that tires and can no longer perform at its peak strength after a workout, our self-control is diminished by previous efforts at control, even if those efforts take place in a totally different realm.
So that little fib at the water cooler you told in order to make yourself seem happier than you are is going to make it hard for you to focus later in the afternoon. A performance or any attempt to hide who you really are, or pretend to be something you aren’t, is going to make it harder later to control your attention and your thoughts, and to regulate your emotions. It’ll increase the odds that you react more aggressively to a provocation, eat more tempting snacks, engage in riskier behaviors, and—this one is pretty compelling to me—perform more poorly on tasks that require executive function, like managing your time, planning, or organizing.
3. You’ll become more stressed and anxious
Let’s just call it like it is: Pretending to be or feel something that you don’t—even if it is a small thing, and even if it is relatively meaningless, and even if it is meant to protect someone else—is a lie.
And lying, even if we do it a lot, or are good at it, is very stressful to our brains and our bodies. The polygraph test depends on this: “Lie Detectors” don’t actually detect lies, but rather they detect the subconscious stress and fear that lying causes. These tests sense changes in our skin electricity, pulse rate, and breathing. They also detect when someone’s vocal pitch has changed in a nearly imperceptible way, a consequence of tension in the body that tightens vocal chords.
The physiological changes that lie detectors sense are caused by glucocorticoids, hormones that are released during a stress response. And as you well know, stress hormones are bad news for your health and happiness over the long run.
Research shows that people who are given instructions for how to lie less in their day-to-day lives are actually able to lie less, and when they do, their physical health improves. For example, they report less trouble sleeping, less tension, fewer headaches, and fewer sore throats. These improvements in health are likely caused by the relative absence of a stress response.
And that’s not all: When the people in the above study lied less, they also reported improvements in their relationships and less anxiety.
We don’t lie or pretend or perform all the time, of course. But when we do, it’s important to see the consequences: increased stress, decreased willpower, impaired relationships. Although we might actually be trying to feel better by putting on a happy face for others, pretending always backfires in the end. Living inauthentically makes life hard and cuts us off from our sweet spot—that place where we have both ease and power.
If you need help living your most authentic life, check out my latest eCourse, The Science of Finding Flow. In 9 self-paced units, you’ll learn to optimize your brain (to detox, focus, feel, and flourish) so that you can allow your most joyful, productive, energetic, and successful self to emerge. Greater Good Science Center members receive 20% off and the proceeds directly support the Greater Good Science Center. Enroll now or learn more here.happiness, honesty, lying, relationships, stress, Features, Family & Couples, Happiness2016-08-09T10:13:00+00:00The Loneliness of the Modern Nomadhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/loneliness_of_modern_nomad
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/loneliness_of_modern_nomad#When:09:16:00ZFor the past five years, I haven’t lived anywhere for more than six months. I spent 28 days in Lisbon, three months in Bali, and a random half-year in downtown Las Vegas. With just two suitcases in tow, I was lucky enough to scuba-dive in Thailand, explore the ruins of Pompeii, and do karaoke with a Korean movie star.

According to Melody Warnick, author of the new book This Is Where You Belong, that makes me a Mover with a capital M. And I have plenty of company: These days, the average American moves nearly 12 times in their lifetime, and 12 percent of Americans move in a given year.

Warnick was once a Mover, but eventually chose to settle down in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her book chronicles her journey toward “place attachment,” a series of research-backed experiments and practices designed to make her love where she lives. Many of these practices—from eating local to organizing collective art projects—come down to community, belonging, and social connection. These are what truly make us love where we live, which also means that we can learn to love nearly any place (or at least like it a little more).

“More than anything else, relationships with people are what make you feel at home in your town,” Warnick writes. “So many of my Love Where You Live experiments had worked because they managed to make me like people in Blacksburg.”

For example, Warnick made a commitment to buy and eat local, and she found herself joining a community-supported agriculture group, shopping at stores she had never before set foot in, and going to the farmers market. Compared to a grocery store, it turns out, people are three times more likely to visit farmers markets with someone else, and have ten times the conversations with sellers once they get there. Plus, local mom-and-pop shops are known for friendlier customer service, writes Warnick; she had a bit of a revelation when she bought a t-shirt at a Blacksburg skateboard shop during a “cash mob,” and the owner thanked her warmly.

“That moment was when it clicked for me that this store was owned by an actual human being,” she writes. “I understood…how what I buy affects my local community.”

Neighborliness may be on the decline—these days, 28 percent of Americans don’t know any of their neighbors by name—but that doesn’t mean it’s any less crucial to keeping us rooted. People who have the strongest social connections nearby (six extended family members within a half-hour drive) are the most satisfied and least restless group, Warnick writes. One Danish study found that a company trying to convince a potential employee to move to a new city would have to pay them an extra $12,500 if they lived next door to their sister. Good relationships with neighbors can be the pull that makes us stay, even when our town doesn’t boast the best restaurants or the cheapest rents.

Place-attached Stayers—the opposite of Movers—are more likely to volunteer, another practice that’s inherently social. Volunteering can make residents feel part of the local “we,” Warnick explains. Joining a giving circle, where groups of people combine their funds and collectively select a charity recipient, is a fast track to community engagement for newcomers and renters.

Even creative projects, another practice Warnick recommends for boosting place attachment, can build relationships. We don’t learn to love where we live by sitting in our apartment and painting the beautiful skyline; we do it by setting up art classes for teens or (in Warnick’s case) organizing a sidewalk chalk event. A place is its people; even enjoying gourmet restaurants and sprawling parks brings us into contact with others.

Warnick’s book helps clarify what I’d missed by living out of a suitcase. Though I feel incredibly fortunate for having had the opportunity to travel so much, moving continuously has made it hard to find that sense of community. When you’re living somewhere for months at a time, the effort it takes to form friendships is almost not worth it—particularly if you’re an introvert like me, who would happily skip the getting-to-know-you part of a relationship and land safely in the comfort of intimacy and deep conversation. After five years of this, I am just a bit lonely.

That’s partly why I, like Warnick, am settling down. I can still travel, and will, but I now realize how important it is to have a place and a community. Inspired by her book, I valiantly try to chat with people in the elevator instead of standing mutely; I felt a surge of gratitude for the perfect indie coffee shop I discovered, just steps from my apartment; and I hope to convince my partner to come see a Blue Jays game—one of Toronto’s quintessential communal experiences—even though we are baseball-indifferent. I’m aware now that if I want Toronto to be my home, I have to make it so, through a spirit of exploration, appreciation, and openness.

Some might think I’m crazy to give up jet setting, but to me the choice is clear: I want to belong.

]]>For the past five years, I haven’t lived anywhere for more than six months. I spent 28 days in Lisbon, three months in Bali, and a random half-year in downtown Las Vegas. With just two suitcases in tow, I was lucky enough to scuba-dive in Thailand, explore the ruins of Pompeii, and do karaoke with a Korean movie star.
According to Melody Warnick, author of the new book This Is Where You Belong, that makes me a Mover with a capital M. And I have plenty of company: These days, the average American moves nearly 12 times in their lifetime, and 12 percent of Americans move in a given year.
But moving continuously has its downsides, according to Warnick. Research shows that people who like their hometown and their neighbors are less anxious and have higher well-being. They’re less likely to experience physical ailments, heart attacks, or stroke; and they even live longer. And one survey found that the happier residents are with their town, the more economically prosperous it is.
Warnick was once a Mover, but eventually chose to settle down in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her book chronicles her journey toward “place attachment,” a series of research-backed experiments and practices designed to make her love where she lives. Many of these practices—from eating local to organizing collective art projects—come down to community, belonging, and social connection. These are what truly make us love where we live, which also means that we can learn to love nearly any place (or at least like it a little more).
“More than anything else, relationships with people are what make you feel at home in your town,” Warnick writes. “So many of my Love Where You Live experiments had worked because they managed to make me like people in Blacksburg.”
For example, Warnick made a commitment to buy and eat local, and she found herself joining a community-supported agriculture group, shopping at stores she had never before set foot in, and going to the farmers market. Compared to a grocery store, it turns out, people are three times more likely to visit farmers markets with someone else, and have ten times the conversations with sellers once they get there. Plus, local mom-and-pop shops are known for friendlier customer service, writes Warnick; she had a bit of a revelation when she bought a t-shirt at a Blacksburg skateboard shop during a “cash mob,” and the owner thanked her warmly.&nbsp;
“That moment was when it clicked for me that this store was owned by an actual human being,” she writes. “I understood…how what I buy affects my local community.”&nbsp;
Neighborliness may be on the decline—these days, 28 percent of Americans don’t know any of their neighbors by name—but that doesn’t mean it’s any less crucial to keeping us rooted. People who have the strongest social connections nearby (six extended family members within a half-hour drive) are the most satisfied and least restless group, Warnick writes. One Danish study found that a company trying to convince a potential employee to move to a new city would have to pay them an extra $12,500 if they lived next door to their sister. Good relationships with neighbors can be the pull that makes us stay, even when our town doesn’t boast the best restaurants or the cheapest rents.
Place-attached Stayers—the opposite of Movers—are more likely to volunteer, another practice that’s inherently social. Volunteering can make residents feel part of the local “we,” Warnick explains. Joining a giving circle, where groups of people combine their funds and collectively select a charity recipient, is a fast track to community engagement for newcomers and renters.
Even creative projects, another practice Warnick recommends for boosting place attachment, can build relationships. We don’t learn to love where we live by sitting in our apartment and painting the beautiful skyline; we do it by setting up art classes for teens or (in Warnick’s case) organizing a sidewalk chalk event. A place is its people; even enjoying gourmet restaurants and sprawling parks brings us into contact with others.
Warnick’s book helps clarify what I’d missed by living out of a suitcase. Though I feel incredibly fortunate for having had the opportunity to travel so much, moving continuously has made it hard to find that sense of community. When you’re living somewhere for months at a time, the effort it takes to form friendships is almost not worth it—particularly if you’re an introvert like me, who would happily skip the getting-to-know-you part of a relationship and land safely in the comfort of intimacy and deep conversation. After five years of this, I am just a bit lonely.
That’s partly why I, like Warnick, am settling down. I can still travel, and will, but I now realize how important it is to have a place and a community. Inspired by her book, I valiantly try to chat with people in the elevator instead of standing mutely; I felt a surge of gratitude for the perfect indie coffee shop I discovered, just steps from my apartment; and I hope to convince my partner to come see a Blue Jays game—one of Toronto’s quintessential communal experiences—even though we are baseball-indifferent. I’m aware now that if I want Toronto to be my home, I have to make it so, through a spirit of exploration, appreciation, and openness.&nbsp;
Some might think I’m crazy to give up jet setting, but to me the choice is clear: I want to belong.community, happiness, relationships, social connections, travel, Book Reviews, Family & Couples, Happiness2016-08-05T09:16:00+00:00